Marcellus/Utica Identity Crisis – What Should Our Region Call Itself?
Being a marketing guy, MDN editor Jim Willis knows that crystallizing a concept into a few key words is critical. You have to be able to convey your meaning in as few words as possible–and those words must be pregnant with meaning. Jim was lucky enough to name this blog/news site Marcellus Drilling News, which (mostly) conveys its purpose–to report on happenings in the Marcellus (later adding the Utica) region. A very smart person who’s given a lot of thought about our industry is Kathryn “Katie” Klaber. Katie owns her own consulting firm–The Klaber Group. But before that, she was founder and president of the Marcellus Shale Coalition (a well-named organization). Katie lives and works in Pittsburgh. In a recent article for the Pittsburgh Business Times, Katie ponders over Pittsburgh (and our industry’s) “identity crisis”–by which she means our lack of good branding. Sometimes our industry and region is referred to as “Appalachia.” But that term often connotes the mountains of West Virginia, spreading out into Kentucky. Sometimes we are referred to as the “Marcellus/Utica basin,” which gets a lot closer to meaningful, but connotes drilling and leaves out the downstream. And sometimes we’re called “the Northeast.” But folks in Ohio consider themselves Midwesterners, not northeasterners. Why is it important to lock down an accurate, pregnant-with-meaning description for our entire industry (upstream, midstream and downstream), and our geographic region? According to Katie, it comes down to two words: capital investment. We need to brand ourselves and do it sooner rather than later, if we want to grow business in our neck of the woods…
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Something that we find to be an outrage is not even getting a passing acknowledgment by mainstream media: most of the climate data collected and pedaled by NASA, NOAA and UK’s Met Office is (our word) falsified. Let us explain. When collecting data, there will be times that a given data point (say a temperature reading) seems incorrect. Usually scientists will discard such “outlier” data, or make adjustments to compensate–so the outlier data doesn’t throw off what would otherwise be accurate. Climate scientists often apply “adjustments” to surface temperature thermometers (i.e. change the readings) to account for “biases” in the data. A new peer-reviewed study titled “On the Validity of NOAA, NASA and Hadley CRU Global Average Surface Temperature Data & The Validity of EPA’s CO2 Endangerment Finding” (full copy below) takes a close look at the adjustments made by NOAA, NASA and the UK in their global average surface temperature (GAST) datasets–and concludes the adjustments nearly always revise temps up. That is, the researchers are showing bias themselves. It is this revised (we call it falsified) data that is then used to proclaim the past three years are the warmest on record in the modern era. The peer-reviewed study, which was done by former rocket scientists, former EPA employees, economists, weather scientists and others, finds the “cyclical pattern in the earlier reported data has very nearly been ‘adjusted’ out of temperature readings taken from weather stations, buoys, ships and other sources.” That is, the warmers who work at NASA, NOAA and in the UK didn’t like the numbers they were getting (they didn’t like reality), so they put their finger on the scale and changed the result. It’s a lie. And now it’s exposed for the world to see…
The “best of the rest” – stories that caught MDN’s eye that you may be interested in reading. In today’s lineup: TETCO NJ pipeline gets FERC approval; Energy Sec Perry visits WV coal plant; Jacksonville LNG plant files for export permit; oil exports fuel TX port boom; super rigs get bigger paychecks in the oil patch; Trump to Europe: if you need energy, give us a call; Trump says Russia holds Europe hostage with gas; why gas-powered cars aren’t going away; and more!
Here on MDN we talk a lot about big interstate natural gas pipelines–like Rover and NEXUS, Atlantic Sunrise and Atlantic Coast. But we don’t talk so much about the tiny (in diameter) gas pipelines that connect to people’s homes. In oil and gas industry parlance, those pipelines belong to the “downstream”–or the end users of natural gas. From time to time we’ve covered stories about NiSource and other utilities spending big money to replace aging local distribution pipelines (see
If the only tool you have is a hammer, you are tempted to treat everything as a nail (Abraham Maslow, 1966). Such is it with radical anti-drillers who recently won a case at the PA Supreme Court by the skin of their teeth. The case dealt with the narrow issue of how PA can spend revenue raised by leasing and allowing drilling for oil and gas under state-owned land (see
Franklin Kury was a young lawyer and PA House of Representatives member back in the late 60s/early 70s. He was, at that time, the author of Pennsylvania’s so-called Environment Rights Amendment (Article I, Section 27 of the PA Constitution). For 40 years the ERA didn’t have much of an impact–but then activist, liberal, leftist judges got ahold of it and (ab)used it to screw with the Marcellus Shale industry in the state. Things “all changed” on June 20 when the PA Supreme Court (ab)used the ERA to tell the Dept. of Conservation and Natural Resources (DCNR) it can’t use money raised from shale drilling to help fund itself–a bass ackwards view of things if ever we’ve heard of one (see
Last year MDN brought you the story of researchers who found microbes (bacteria) living nearly two miles down in Utica Shale wells. They dubbed one of the never-before-seen bacterial “lifeforms” in the well Frackibacter. We immediately labeled it a different name: Frackenstein (see 
Our favorite government agency, the U.S. Energy Information Administration, has done us all a huge favor. Yesterday we brought you a post by EIA’s Today in Energy that points out in 2016 some 81% of all the energy we used in the US of A came from fossil fuels (see 

So-called “activist investor” (i.e. corporate raider) Jana Partners, in league with the Cohen family (Atlas Energy) has started a proxy fight and is trying to block EQT’s takover/merger with Rice Energy. Jana is the same company that recently helped Amazon buy Whole Foods. In a filing with the Securities and Exchange Commission on Tuesday (embedded below), Jana disclosed the company has purchased ~5% of EQT’s stock and is launching an effort to block EQT’s proposed buyout of Rice Energy (see
Although a final investment decision (FID) is still months away, Thailand-based PTT Global Chemical decided spending $13.8 million to buy 168 acres at the proposed site for a second Appalachia ethane cracker, in Belmont County, OH, would be a good investment. Which they have now done. The deal, which closed in June, is just now coming to light. PTT bought the land for the site from FirstEnergy Corporation. The deal was recorded at the Belmont County Courthouse on June 14. This is yet another sign that PTT will make a positive FID later this year. Even though PTT just bought the land, work was previously done on the site to clear it and get it ready for construction, as we reported in December (see 