Susquehanna County Residents Love Burning Locally Produced Gas
Susquehanna County, PA, which sits just across the border from where MDN is written in Broome County, NY, is one of the miracles in the Marcellus Shale. Cabot Oil & Gas, among a few other drillers, have extensive operations in Susquehanna County. In fact, all of Cabot’s PA wells are located in that one county, and Cabot produces (at last check) over 1.5 billion cubic feet of natural gas PER DAY. It’s an amazing story. One of the ironies has always been that rural counties like Susquehanna that produce natural gas often aren’t able to use the gas they produce due to lack of pipeline infrastructure. The entire county has 43,000 residents (11,700 families). The largest “city” in Susquehanna County is the county seat of Montrose, population 1,600 (750 households). It’s just not all that economical to run natural gas pipelines to homes around the county–even though residents live atop an embarrassing riches of natural gas. One company, Leatherstocking Natural Gas, changed all that in late 2013 when they started to run pipelines to residences and businesses around Montrose. How has it turned out? The people who are hooked up and burning Marcellus gas locally produced have high praise…
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Way back in May 2014 MDN told you that UGI Energy Services, a subsidiary of UGI (a utility company in northeast PA) would build two new pipelines in northeast PA for $80 million that will allow them to transport cheap, abundant, locally extracted natural gas from Cabot Oil & Gas in Susquehanna County to residents in the greater Scranton/Wilkes-Barre area (see 
Sometimes you have to reach out to the other side (i.e. the unreasonable enemy of fossil fuels) to try and convince them that the oil and gas industry is not Satanic. We don’t bother with trying to convince them (lost cause in our opinion), but kudos to those who have the patience to try it. Case in point: Cabot Oil & Gas recently hosted a delegation from the Big Green/radical group Trout Unlimited (TU). TU, you may recall, is the sad story of a once great group co-opted into being a radical green group (see 
Cabot Oil & Gas is one of the stellar success stories of the Marcellus Shale. They drill in a single northeastern Pennsylvania county–Susquehanna County (near where MDN is located). From that single county Cabot produces 1.7-1.8 billion cubic feet (Bcf) per day of natural gas. If you want to know how to “do it right” with shale drilling in the Marcellus–you watch Cabot. The company participated in the Barclays CEO Energy/Power Conference 2015 last week in New York City. We grabbed a copy of their PowerPoint presentation from that event and include it below, along with some of the insights we glean from reviewing the presentation…
A new research study appearing in an online “journal” with very low standards, PLOS ONE, claims that hydraulic fracturing leads to an increase in hospitalization rates in the Marcellus Shale region. The research study, titled “Unconventional Gas and Oil Drilling Is Associated with Increased Hospital Utilization Rates” (full copy embedded below) on the surface appears to contain damning evidence. Researchers from the University of Pennsylvania and Columbia University looked at hospitalization records for three northeastern Pennsylvania counties from 2007-2011–Bradford, Susquehanna and Wayne. Both Bradford and Susquehanna counties have seen a huge amount of shale drilling over that period. Wayne County, on the other hand, has seen no shale drilling because of the intransigence of the Delaware River Basin Commission and their ongoing frack ban. The researchers say that people in Bradford and Susquehanna counties go to the hospital for serious heart conditions at a rate 27% higher than those in Wayne County. Ergo, there is a connection between fracking and health issues. We are fully in favor of rigorous academic research into issues like this one. But a few things bother us about this latest “fracking kills” study…
WPX Energy announced yesterday that they’ve sold more of (the rest of?) their northeast Marcellus Shale assets. This time it’s not leases and wells, but instead “various long-term natural gas purchase and sales agreements, along with 135 million Btu per day of firm transportation capacity on Transco’s Northeast Supply Link project.” That is, WPX was on the hook to either buy or sell natural gas along pipelines at certain locations in the northeast region, and those deals to buy and sell gas were sold, along with WPX’s contract to flow up to 135 million Btus (which equates to just 135 thousand cubic feet, or 135 Mcf) of natural gas on Transco’s Northeast Supply Link pipeline system. The combined sale was to an unnamed buyer for approximately $200 million. MDN has a guess about who the mystery buyer is…