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Fed Court Says WV Driller Doesn’t Have to Produce Gas to Keep Lease
We spotted a write-up on a recent court decision coming from the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fourth Circuit in which a West Virginia landowner had a signed Marcellus lease requiring PetroEdge (later Statoil) to drill three wells on or under their property. And yet the courts have sided with the driller, essentially allowing the driller to wiggle out of the terms of the lease.
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Thank God anti fossil fuelers are throwing in the towel in West Virginia–at least for this year–in their never-ending campaign to stop shale drilling in the state. A recent article appearing in the biased ProPublica and Charleston Gazette-Mail highlights antis’ frustration in not getting their bills to advance in this year’s legislative session–a session that is rapidly coming to a close.
Yesterday we told you that the West Virginia Surface Owners Rights Organization (SORO) is pushing a couple of bills to address the issue of abandoned and orphan wells (see 
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 
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.