WV Legislature Closes Loophole for Drill Cuttings in Landfills
Earlier this year, the West Virginia legislature passed a bill allowing the state’s landfills to create a special cell with special monitoring to accept shale cuttings–leftover rock and dirt–as much as they want and can handle (see WV Drill Cuttings in Landfill Bill Passes in Record Time). That is, with one important exception: The new law disallows a special cell for drill cuttings to be built in landfills that sit over top a “karst” topography (where there are a lot of underground caves, sinkholes, cracks and fast-moving underground streams). However, there was a loophole, an oversight, in the new law: If landfills above a karst topography area are happy with maintaining their current lower cap of 9,999 tons per day of solid waste, they can accept shale drill cuttings in the regular part of the landfill (see Loophole in WV Landfill Law for Drill Cuttings Raises Concern). Oops. The loophole has now been closed…
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The Chesapeake Energy fire sale continues–and this time it’s cut right into the bone and sinew of the company. The beneficiary of Chesapeake’s ongoing divestiture, this time, is Southwestern Energy. Southwestern has signed a deal to pick up 413,000 (!) Marcellus/Utica acres, most of it in West Virginia with some of it in Washington County, PA. Much of the land is in prime wet gas areas (see the map below). The deal includes 256 (!) operating and producing Marcellus and Utica Shale wells and another 179 (!) non-operated, non-producing wells–a total of 435 drilled wells. Southwestern is paying Chesapeake $5.375 BILLION for the deal–which will make Chesapeake’s real boss, corporate raider Carl Icahn, very happy…
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With blue capes unfurled and their Spandex tights removed from deep in the back of the closet (and it’s not even Halloween for another three weeks), the