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Weekly Shale Drilling Permits for PA, OH, WV: Aug 2-8
Last week only Pennsylvania issued permits to drill new shale wells. Both Ohio and West Virginia issued no new drilling permits. Summer doldrums? Some 8 of the 11 permits issued in PA were to Seneca Resources, all of them in Elk County, and 7 of the 8 were for the same well pad. The other 3 permits were issued to EQT in three different counties.
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Two and a half years after Energy Transfer’s (ET) 24-inch Revolution Pipeline entered service in western Pennsylvania and exploded following a landslide (in September 2018), the pipeline finally returned to service in March of this year (see 
Anecdotally it seems as though there has been less drilling activity in the Marcellus/Utica over the past year. Some say it’s due to the coronavirus pandemic. Others say there’s more to it than that. If you’ve tracked public announcements by drilling companies, they claim to have pulled back on drilling and won’t increase current levels of drilling even when/if the price of natural gas increases. Why? They must turn a profit, or investors leaving for greener pastures (pun intended). But is there really less drilling happening in the M-U today than say one year ago?
Just yesterday MDN told you that Chesapeake Energy had enrolled in the same program EQT Corporation previously enrolled in to certify its natural gas as “responsibly sourced” (see 
In our opinion, we have yet to fully understand the long-term, permanent changes in society that have happened because of the COVID-19 pandemic. There are signs that things have permanently changed. For example, a significant number of people now work from home rather than commute to an office in downtown. Many workers like working from home better! In a signal that COVID long-term changes are impacting the Marcellus/Utica industry, two major M-U companies with office space in the Southpointe business park (Pittsburgh suburb in Washington County) are shopping a collective 213,000 square feet of office space they no longer need because their workers have permanently relocated to home offices.
In February 2020, Pennsylvania Dept. of Environmental Protection (DEP) Secretary Pat McDonnell sent a letter to the federal Pipeline and Hazardous Materials Safety Administration (PHMSA). McDonnell’s letter alleges Shell’s 97-mile, two-legged Falcon pipeline system that will carry ethane to the mighty Shell cracker plant now under construction in Beaver County, PA, “may have been constructed with defective corrosion coating protection.” It’s an explosive charge just coming to light now, more than a year later.