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Gun-Toting WV Judge in EQT Royalty Lawsuit Publicly Admonished
Just last week, we told you that a West Virginia Circuit Court judge who allegedly waved and pointed a gun at an attorney for EQT Corporation during a hearing about a case brought against EQT by landowners for improper deductions of post-production expenses from their royalty payments had resigned (see Gun-Toting Judge in Landowner/EQT Royalty Lawsuit Resigns). We now know why. The WV Judicial Investigation Commission (JIC) has publicly admonished the judge. He cannot, as part of an agreement with the JIC, serve as a judge in WV again.
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Last week (Nov. 21-27) the number of permits issued to drill new shale wells slumped to 17 from the prior week’s 26. In Pennsylvania, 12 permits were issued, eight to Seneca Resources (one pad) in Cameron County, and four to Chesapeake Energy (one pad) in Bradford County. In Ohio, four permits were issued to Encino Energy, one in Carroll County and three (one pad) in Harrison County. And West Virginia at least received a single new permit, for Antero Resources in Doddridge County, after getting skunked the previous week.
According to insiders in the D.C. swamp, the deal that U.S. Senator Joe Manchin (from West Virginia) made with Sen. Chuck Schumer (from New York) to get a “permitting reform” bill passed that would, among other things, allow the 303-mile Mountain Valley Pipeline (MVP), currently 94% built and in the ground, is on “life support.” The bill proposed by Manchin would bypass the clown judges on the 4th Circuit Court of Appeals who are blocking it. The bill supposedly would allow MVP to finish and go online. However, Republicans are being falsely accused of blocking it.
While tracking the active rig count week by week can give you a little sugar high, we think tracking the count month by month is more illustrative of where the count (and drilling activity) is heading. Baker Hughes is the grandaddy of rig counts, having tracked rigs since 1944. You need a rig to drill a new well, so counting active rigs gives you an idea of overall drilling activity. What do the rig counts look like for Pennsylvania, Ohio, and West Virginia over the past two years? Is drilling activity going up, or down, in our region? We have the answer.
John Deskins, director of the Bureau of Business & Economic Research at West Virginia University, told members of the state legislature’s Joint Committee on Natural Gas Development at a meeting on Monday that the severance tax on natural gas production in the state is responsible for more than 20% of the state’s record-breaking tax revenue surpluses. Natural gas severance tax collections between July and October accounted for approximately 20% of the $575 million in total general revenue fund surplus tax revenue during that time period.
Earlier this year, Equitrans Midstream announced it had filed a new pipeline expansion project with the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission (see 
We have chronicled a number of companies that buy royalty and/or mineral rights from landowners in the Marcellus/Utica over the years (see our previous stories about royalty mineral rights sales 
A press release issued yesterday announced the partnership between an Appalachian driller we aren’t familiar with, Oil Well Shares (OWS), and Canada-based OYA Renewables to form a joint venture called Chrysalis Energy. The new company will use OWS’s 1.5 million leased acres across Pennsylvania, Ohio, and West Virginia to build solar farms, wind farms, and “energy storage infrastructure projects.” We have some thoughts about this partnership and how it may impact landowners.
U.S. Senator Joe Manchin, Democrat from West Virginia, ended his political future when he sold out the country by voting in favor of the misnamed Inflation Reduction Act (IRA), which is actually a mini-Green New Deal bill (see