Anti-Drilling/Fossil Fuel | Fayette County | Industrywide Issues | Regulation | Wastewater | West Virginia
2 Democrat Commissioners Ban Injection Wells in Fayette County, WV
In the end it was just two people who decided to outlaw a legally operating wastewater injection well in Fayette County, WV. Two county commissioners, Denise Scalph and Matt Wender (both Democrats), voted to end the right of Danny Webb Construction to operate an injection well in the county, as it has done for over a decade (perhaps longer, we’re not sure). Aided by a rabidly leftist group called the Mountain Party (left of Vlad Putin), the so-called county commission attorney, Larry Harrah, crafted the state’s first “screw ’em royally” ordinance that he believes is lawsuit-proof. We’ll see just how lawsuit-proof it is when it gets tested, as it surely will…
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In a somewhat complicated scam, a former landman for XTO Energy, Steven E. Fisackerly (33 years old) defrauded XTO out of more than $1 million with fake lease deals in the West Virginia Marcellus Shale region. He cooked up bogus documents and passed them off as real, pocketing commissions. He even worked with a supposed/fake mineral rights owner to pocket kickbacks from lease payments sent to the fake rights owner. It was elaborate and convoluted–and ultimately stupid. Fisackerly plead guilty in May and will enter prison on January 4. His sentence? Pay back more than $1 million he defrauded from XTO, and serve 63 months (over 5 years) in federal prison…
It’s something straight out of the Tom Cruise movie Minority Report. The federal Environmental Protection Agency has fined the owner of five Pennsylvania natural gas processing plants and one West Virginia plant (six plants total) $50,221 for spills and leaks at the plants–that never happened. The EPA says Elkhorn Gas Processing hasn’t done enough to prevent such incidents from potentially happening, and therefore the EPA is shaking them down and making them pay for possible future violations. Perhaps it’s more like The Godfather than the Minority Report? Talk about an abuse of power! Do you need any further evidence that the Obama EPA is totally out of control?…
Wait a minute! We thought the proposed Odebrecht ethane cracker plant near Parkersburg in Wood County, WV was all but dead. Lifeless. In April the company said it was “re-evaluating plans” to build it (see 
Noble Energy is a global driller involved in a number of shale plays in the U.S. including the DJ Basin, Eagle Ford Shale, Delaware Basin and Marcellus Shale. Noble idled the last remaining drilling rig they were operating in the Marcellus in September (see 
Stone Energy, an independent oil and natural gas exploration and production company (E&P) headquartered in Lafayette, Louisiana drills mainly in the Gulf of Mexico but also has a presence in the Marcellus/Utica Shale. Earlier this year the company released the one active Marcellus rig they were running and said they would not resume drilling in the northeast until receiving a hybrid rig in late 2015/early 2016 that can drill both Marcellus and Utica wells (see