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FERC Says More of Mountaineer XPress Pipeline OK to Start Up
In January the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission (FERC) gave permission to TransCanada’s Columbia Pipeline group to start up a portion of the Mountaineer XPress Pipeline in West Virginia (see FERC OK’s Mountaineer XPress Pipe to Start Up in WV). Yesterday FERC gave Columbia permission to start up a wee bit more of the project.
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US Methanol broke ground in September 2017 in Institute (Kanawha County), WV to build its very first methanol production plant (see 
Here’s something we didn’t know: In West Virginia there’s a regulation on the books, put there decades ago (pre-shale), that stipulates wells targeting “deep” formations including the Utica Shale must be at least 3,000 feet apart.
Yesterday MDN began our lead story about a big fine for Antero Resources by saying, “This has to be a record-high amount for a fine plus remediation work, at least in the Marcellus/Utica.” We humbly admit we were wrong. In checking our records, we found that in a similar case from 2014, Trans Energy paid even more, quite a bit more. We researched what this whole business is about, why Antero and others were fined, interviewing a top Antero official, and we now have a far better understanding of what happened and why.
In 2013 some 10,000 West Virginia landowners/rights owners filed a class action lawsuit against EQT over their practice of post-production deductions from royalty checks. The lawsuit was scheduled to go to trial last November, but at the last minute, it didn’t. Word leaked that EQT had settled out of court (see 
A partisan left-wing group calling itself the West Virginia Center on Budget & Policy along with another partisan left-wing group called the Institute for Energy Economics and Financial Analysis (IEEFA) released a report last week that claims WV’s shale industry has “fallen short” in delivering on economic promises, and the way to fix it is to boost the severance tax from 5% to 10%! Yeah, they’re out of their collectivist minds.
This has to be a record-high amount for a fine plus remediation work, at least in the Marcellus/Utica. Antero Resources has cut a deal with three government entities–the U.S. Dept. of Justice, federal Environmental Protection Agency, and West Virginia Dept. of Environmental Protection–to pay a $3.15 million fine and spend another $8 million to mitigate and restore 32 sites in West Virginia.
Here’s an interesting twist on the theme of drillers shorting leaseholders out of royalty money. Usually such cases involve drillers claiming post-production deductions from landowner royalty checks. This time the landowner/rightsholder is Columbia Gas Transmission (pipeline company owned by midstream giant TransCanada), and the claim is that Southwestern Energy (driller) is not paying royalties for gas produced but not actually sold.
MDN previously reported on efforts in both Ohio and Pennsylvania to plug orphaned and abandoned oil and gas wells (all of them conventional/vertical wells), which present a health and safety issue. It’s all too easy to hit one of these old wells when drilling a new horizontal shale well. In WV, a new effort to plug old wells is causing concern for some–that the effort to plug old wells may inflict economic damage on WV counties. Huh?!
We didn’t think it would take long for the oil and gas industry to push back against efforts to raise the state’s severance tax from 5% to 6% and use the “extra” money to fix secondary roads in the state (see 
Why do politicians never seem to grasp the obvious? Distressingly, we’re now reading that a West Virginia State Senator, Randy Smith (Republican, Tucker County), wants to add another 1% to the already-high 5% natural gas and oil severance tax, in order to use the money to fix back roads across the Mountain State.
Westmoreland Gas, headquartered in Bridgeport, WV, was founded in August 2018 by two industry veterans, one with close ties to Mountain V Oil & Gas. According to a press release issued two days ago, Westmoreland closed on oil and gas assets in WV on Dec. 31, essentially launching the company.
The Independent Oil & Gas Association of West Virginia (IOGAWV) held its annual winter meeting on Tuesday and Wednesday. There was a LOT of talk of WV nabbing the much-talked-about multi-billion dollar NGL storage hub project.