Murrysville, PA Stream Monitoring Group Expands to Air Monitoring
A volunteer group in Westmoreland County called the Murrysville Stream Monitoring Group tests seven local streams once each month, looking for total dissolved solids. They’ve been testing since September of last year. The group was started and is populated by anti-drillers, people opposed to Marcellus Shale drilling. The locations they’ve selected to test are close to active Marcellus well drilling operations. What have they found so far? Nothing. Each stream has passed every test they’ve done—both upstream close to well drilling and downstream away from drilling. Same result—nothing.
Since they aren’t finding anything in the streams, maybe it’s time for the Murrysville Group to turn their attention to the air. And so they have. But monitoring air is expensive, requiring equipment that costs $3,000 per unit. The group wants three units, and they want taxpayers to fund it:
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In March 2010, CONSOL Energy (Cecil, PA) paid Dominion Resources $3.5 billion for 500,000 acres of Marcellus Shale gas leases, instantly tripling their lease holdings. Since that time, CONSOL has continued to invest in Marcellus acreage and they now have 750,000 acres under lease. But CONSOL had a problem: Not enough money to develop their vast Marcellus acreage. So they did what is now a common practice—they found a partner to invest. Yesterday, CONSOL and Noble Energy (Houston, TX) announced that Noble will buy a 50 percent interest in 663,350 net undeveloped acres and fund drilling and completion costs in a deal worth $3.4 billion over an eight-year period.