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33 New Shale Well Permits Issued for PA-OH-WV Jan 24-30
Our apologies that this latest weekly permit update is a day late. Normally we issued these updates on Wednesdays. Yesterday the Pennsylvania database we use to locate information on new permits issued was throwing an error. We alerted the PA Dept. of Environmental Protection, which maintains the database, and they got it fixed sometime last night. So we’re back! Our thanks to the programmers at the DEP.
The total number of permits across PA, OH and WV last week were down by about half from the week before. There were 33 new permits issued last week vs. 61 two weeks ago.
Read More “33 New Shale Well Permits Issued for PA-OH-WV Jan 24-30”
Holy smokes! What just happened? For months (and months and months) the cumulative number of weekly permits issued to drill new shale wells in the Marcellus/Utica has fluctuated from the low teens to perhaps 30 total on the upper end. Last week, from Jan. 17-23, an amazing 61 permits were issued to drill new shale wells. Double the usual. Wow! Pennsylvania issued 24 new permits, Ohio issued 9, and blow-the-doors-off-we’ve-never-seen-so-many-permits-issued-in-one-week for West Virginia, the Mountain State issued 28 new shale permits.
U.S. Senator from West Virginia Shelley Moore Capito “Zoomed” in to address the Gas and Oil Association of West Virginia’s (GO-WV) annual winter meeting last week. She talked about the Biden infrastructure bill, which she supported, and Biden’s so-called Build Back Better bill, which she does not support. As part of her comments, Capito mentioned the $1.2 trillion infrastructure bill includes money for “an Appalachian ethane/hydrogen storage hub.” Wow! We thought that project was long dead.
Earlier this week West Virginia State Treasurer Riley Moore announced the WV Board of Treasury Investments, which manages the state’s roughly $8 billion operating funds, will no longer use BlackRock Inc. investment funds as part of its banking transactions (see 
Just coming to light for us now is an application to build a “data center” in Morgantown, WV. The application was filed last August, but the WV Dept. of Environmental Protection’s Division of Air Quality held a hearing yesterday to accept public input on the facility. Marion Energy Partners wants to build the facility, yet its purpose is shrouded in mystery. The best guess is that this is another new cryptocurrency (bitcoin) mining operation. Our interest is that it will use four natural gas-fired turbines to generate the huge amounts of electricity needed to operate it–natural gas that will come from the Marcellus/Utica.
West Virginia House of Delegates member Lisa Zukoff (Democrat from Marshall County) is making a bold claim: Some out-of-state property owners aren’t paying taxes on oil and gas royalties, and it is costing the state millions of dollars in lost revenue. Zukoff is (once again) introducing a bill in the annual two-month session of the state legislature that requires gas and oil companies to subtract any taxes from the royalty check before it is sent to the property owner.
Our friends at NGI (Natural Gas Intelligence) are running an excellent series providing expert forecasts for the global natural gas and oil markets in 2022. The latest installment interviews several experts about the prospects for the Marcellus/Utica. With the Shell ethane cracker plant coming online sometime this year, the prospects for NGL sales in the M-U have picked up. Also in the discussion: capping Pennsylvania’s orphaned wells, drilling in the Wayne National Forest, and the Mountain Valley Pipeline coming online.
There is a clear delineation in the U.S. Constitution that says anything not specifically enumerated in the Constitution is left up to the individual states to govern and regulate. Leftists have for years tried to chip away, and under Joe Biden dynamite away, that distinction. Especially with regard to nationalizing the regulation of oil and gas drilling. The left’s favorite tool to regulate O&G is the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), which is charged with regulating and enforcing various laws including the federal Clean Air Act (CAA) and federal Clean Water Act (CWA). In a case that will be heard by the U.S. Supreme Court next month, West Virginia v. Environmental Protection Agency, the “potential ramifications” are “profound” according to anyone and everyone paying attention.
The West Virginia State Legislature passed House Bill (HB) 2581 on the last day of the annual WV legislative session in April 2021. HB 2581 changes how the State Tax Department values producing oil and gas wells for property tax purposes (see 
Since early 2015 (seven years ago!) we’ve been tracking stories about various proposals to build Marcellus gas-fired power plants in the Mountain State (see 
In December a jury in Ritchie County, WV awarded the county’s Economic Development Authority (EDA) nearly $1 million in damages in a trespassing case. The case is complicated, but at its heart is the issue of a Marcellus-focused company, Ronald Lane Inc., and land Lane deeded to the local EDA. A lawsuit against Lane alleged the company leased the deeded land for “oil and gas purposes” (to Columbia Gas as a heavy equipment storage facility) and that Lane never told the EDA about the lease nor shared the profits received from that lease.