Carrizo Oil & Gas | Energy Companies | Industrywide Issues | Lease & Royalty Payments | Litigation | Pennsylvania | Susquehanna County
PA Landowners Sue Callon for Shifting Assets to Avoid Class Action
We have two related lawsuits to report on involving landowners in Susquehanna County, PA, and Callon Petroleum. As most lawsuits are, these two are complicated. But, at a very high level, the concept is simple. The landowners allege that Callon Marcellus (formerly Carrizo Marcellus) shorted them on royalty payments. The landowners sued, but Callon sold its assets in northeastern PA (to BKV) and engaged in a shell game to move the proceeds of that sale ($74 million) directly to the mothership, Callon Petroleum, as a way of avoiding liability to pay, just in case they lose the royalty lawsuit.
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New shale permits issued for Jan. 2-8 in the Marcellus/Utica included 14 new permits in Pennsylvania, 8 new permits in Ohio, and just 1 new permit in West Virginia. The top recipient of permits for last week was Apex Energy, grabbing 6 permits to drill on a single pad in Westmoreland County, PA. Right behind Apex was Coterra Energy with 5 permits to drill on a single pad in Susquehanna County, PA. Opposite sides of the state.
Unlike the Delaware River Basin Commission (DRBC), which gets the creepy crawlies at the mere mention of the word “fracking,” the Susquehanna River Basin Commission (SRBC) has been dealing with fracking and water requests for use in fracking for more than a decade. Somehow the SRBC, a quasi-governmental agency (as is the DRBC), manages to allow fracking, and there are NO negative impacts on local water and NO negative impact on the Susquehanna River and its tributaries. Must be the people who run the SRBC are just more talented than those who run the DRBC.
Yesterday MDN brought you the great news that Coterra Energy (formerly Cabot Oil & Gas) would be allowed to restart drilling in a nine-square-mile area in Dimock, PA (Susquehanna County) following a “no contest” plea deal with PA’s bullying Attorney General, Josh Shapiro, on a misdemeanor charge (see 
For all of you Paul Harvey fans (God rest his soul), this is, “The Rest of the Story.” Two weeks ago, Pennsylvania Attorney General Josh Shapiro, about to become Governor on Jan. 1 (a bona fide tragedy), made a big splash by announcing he had finally bullied Coterra Energy, the former Cabot Oil & Gas, into taking a plea deal in the infamous Dimock, PA case of methane migration into a few water wells (see 
The partisan bully Josh Shapiro, far-left Attorney General in Pennsylvania (who is becoming Governor on Jan. 1, to PA’s shame), has claimed victory in converting what was at best an accident into a crime against Coterra Energy (née Cabot Oil & Gas). Yesterday in a courtroom in Susquehanna County, PA, Coterra plead “no contest” to a single misdemeanor charge Shapiro ginned up against the company over stray methane in a few water wells in Dimock, PA going back 14 years. It is a horrible miscarriage of justice. We wouldn’t blame Coterra if they NEVER drill another well in the state.
Pennsylvania State Senator Katie Muth’s attempt to block a proposed frack wastewater treatment plant in Dimock (hours away from her own district) has completely bombed out. Muth tried to challenge and block a permit for the plant, an effort which was mostly rejected in court back in June (see 
Spanish-owed Repsol owns 214,000 net acres of leases in the Marcellus Shale, primarily located in northeastern Pennsylvania in Bradford, Susquehanna, and Tioga counties. Earlier this year, Repsol said it was working with certification authority MiQ to have all of its Marcellus production certified as “responsibly produced” (see