Earthquakes | Energy Companies | EQT Corp | Industrywide Issues | Pennsylvania | Regulation | Westmoreland County
DEP Closes Probe of Tiny Westmoreland Quake Near EQT Utica Pad
The Pennsylvania Department of Environmental Protection (DEP) has finished looking into the teeny-tiny earthquake that hit near EQT’s Porter well pad in Allegheny Township (Westmoreland County) on Oct. 4. The verdict: no violation, no cause identified, and the pad keeps on working. When MDN told you about this “seismic event” last month, we pointedly did not jump to conclusions about whether the well caused it (see Westmoreland Seismic Event: DEP Checks EQT Pad, No Red Flags Found). That turned out to be the right call. Read More “DEP Closes Probe of Tiny Westmoreland Quake Near EQT Utica Pad”
There’s a new sheriff in town. Well, technically a retired police chief. On Thursday evening (Oct. 22), more than 150 residents gathered in Penn Township, Westmoreland County, for the kickoff of the Citizens Energy Council (CEC), a grassroots group that supports natural gas drilling and openly pushes back against the anti-fossil fuel activists who have dominated township meetings in this part of Pennsylvania for more than a decade. CEC’s leader, former Penn Township Police Chief John Otto, summed up the group’s message in three words: “Enough is enough.” Music to our ears! 
The Upper Burrell Township (Westmoreland County, PA) Planning Commission voted 5-0 Tuesday night to recommend the township’s data center ordinance, handing it to the three township supervisors. The supervisors hold a public hearing at 6 p.m. tonight (Oct. 22), followed by a special meeting to consider adopting it. They’re racing the clock: the township’s data center moratorium expires Nov. 2, just 11 days from now. Last month we told you the draft quietly requires every new data center to make its own around-the-clock (“baseload”) power, which in southwest Pennsylvania means natural gas. As best we can tell, that requirement survived. 
JKLM Energy, the private drilling company run by Buffalo Bills and Sabres owner Terry Pegula, has applied to drill a shale well in Salem Township, Westmoreland County, PA, next to the Totteridge Golf Course. The Pittsburgh Tribune-Review’s story on the permit says the well would tap a “1,000-acre pool of methane.” Um, no. There is no underground lake of gas sitting beneath Salem and Hempfield townships, waiting for someone to stick a straw in it. What JKLM has put together is a pooled drilling unit. That’s a legal arrangement, not a geological feature. The difference matters a great deal to the 64 landowners who will someday be cashing royalty checks from this well. 
Another data center proposal has landed in Westmoreland County, PA. This one is a 1.1-million-square-foot building on old farmland in South Huntingdon Township, right off I-70 and across the road from the Pittsburgh Renaissance Festival. The developers are Sippel Development Co. of Zelienople and TriEnergy of Sewickley — the latter a company that has spent roughly 30 years buying land for oil and gas development. The plans filed with the township don’t say where the electricity will come from. But we have a pretty good guess. The site sits about a mile from Tenaska’s 940-megawatt natural gas-fired power plant, and gas wells are nearby. Here’s what we know. 
The Pittsburgh Tribune-Review (via the TribLive website) ran a big Saturday feature arguing that Western Pennsylvania’s drilling rebound is being driven by the data center boom. The legwork is real — five township officials, two activist groups, a CNX executive, a Pitt professor. The framing isn’t. The story gives readers three different answers to “how many wells does Pennsylvania have,” gets the cause of last year’s drilling backward, and then, twelve hundred words in, quietly disproves its own headline. 
The Marcellus/Utica region received 16 new drilling permits last week, September 7 – 13, down from the 28 permits issued two weeks ago. Pennsylvania issued 13 of the new permits. Ohio issued 3 new permits. And West Virginia issued no new permits. The drillers who received new permits last week were: CNX Resources, EOG Resources, EQT, Infinity Natural Resources, and Range Resources. 
The Upper Burrell Township (Westmoreland County, PA) Planning Commission hit the pause button Tuesday on recommending the township’s latest draft data center ordinance. The delay gives residents time to email their wish lists to supervisors before an Oct. 7 meeting. Supervisors hope to pass the ordinance at a special meeting in October, ahead of the Nov. 2 end of their data center moratorium, and Westmoreland County gets a say, too. The rules won’t touch TECfusions’ existing operations at the former Alcoa/Arconic campus, but they would govern new development there. Buried in the 26-page draft is a line that should make every Marcellus/Utica (M-U) driller and landowner sit up: every new data center must supply its own baseload power. And the township says its next project is writing rules for power plants. 
Eastern Gas Transmission and Storage (EGTS), a wholly owned subsidiary of Berkshire Hathaway Energy (Warren Buffett’s company), got the last piece of paper it needed yesterday for an important new pipeline project. FERC’s Office of Energy Projects issued a notice to proceed (NTP) on Sept. 10, authorizing EGTS to start building the Appalachian Reliability Project (ARP) — the 550,000 dekatherms/day expansion that will push more Marcellus and Utica gas from western Pennsylvania into Ohio. Even better, the approval comes in roughly six months ahead of the company’s own published timeline. 
Anti-drilling group Protect PT has opened a new front against the biggest gas-fired AI project in Westmoreland County, Pennsylvania. On Aug. 25, Protect PT and two Upper Burrell residents — Allen Uhler and Guy Fuller — filed a land use appeal in Westmoreland County Court challenging the township supervisors’ approval of TECfusions’ work at the former Alcoa/Arconic research campus. Notably, the appeal doesn’t attack the gas turbines or the Marcellus wells feeding them. It attacks a piece of paper. Or rather, the absence of one. 
Nineteen months after TECfusions bought the old Alcoa research campus in Upper Burrell (Westmoreland County), PA, and promised to build 3 gigawatts of gas-fired AI computing capacity, the company announced yesterday that the site is live and delivering GPU capacity to a paying customer. It’s a small first bite of a very large apple—but it’s real, it’s running on gas turbines today, and it sits on top of Marcellus wells the company already owns. 
Despite claims by anti-fossil-fuelers that the Tenaska Westmoreland Generating Station in southwestern PA would spread disease and death if it were built, it’s been up and running since 2018, producing power and generating revenue for both its builders and the community. Oh, and everyone is in good health. However, the plant has been operating under a state permit since it opened. It needs a federal Title V permit for long-term operation. The state Department of Environmental Protection (DEP) issues such a permit. Good news! The DEP recently issued the Title V permit for this power plant. 
An important (precedential) court ruling to alert Pennsylvania surface (and mineral rights) owners to. The Pennsylvania Superior Court ruled earlier this month that an oil-and-gas mineral rights owner does not have an automatic, unrestricted right to place a well on a separately owned surface estate. When the deed or lease contains no express surface-access right, the mineral owner must establish that using that surface is “strictly necessary”—not merely reasonable—to reach and develop the underlying oil and gas. The case in question concerns land in Westmoreland County but will almost certainly apply to other locations as well.