PA Senator Reintroducing Bill to Reduce Marcellus Waste Reporting
On Tuesday, PA State Sen. Elder Vogel (Republican from Beaver, PA) circulated a co-sponsor memo that states his intent to re-introduce a bill that will remove some of the hassles drillers now face with the recent adoption of new Marcellus drilling regulations. Specifically, Vogel wants to change the DEP (Dept. of Environmental Protection) regulation requirement that drillers must file paperwork to report the amount and disposition of drilling waste–which would include wastewater and drill cuttings–from monthly to every six months. Every gallon of frack and produced water that comes out of a well, and every square inch of leftover rock and dirt, must be tracked and a report filed. The new Chapter 78a drilling regulations adopted by the DEP requires monthly reports to be filled out–a virtual blizzard of paperwork. Vogel wants to make it more manageable with biennial reports instead…
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Deal-making (mergers and acquisitions, or M&A) in the Marcellus went through the roof in 2016 as compared with 2015. In 2016, there were 13 deals worth $100 million or more. The total value of deals in 2016 was a big $7.25 billion, compared with $920 million in 2015. What was the #1 M&A deal in the Marcellus for 2016? Rice Energy’s purchase of Vantage Energy for $2.7 billion (see 
A professor from an Ohio college had the temerity to publish a guest column in the liberal Cleveland Plain Dealer taking federal regulators to task over the years-long wait time it takes to get a new LNG (liquefied natural gas) facility approved. Prof. Robert Chase, Emeritus Professor in the Department of Petroleum Engineering and Geology at Marietta College, says more natural gas needs to reach the world market, via LNG, and if it doesn’t, the lack of LNG exports will put Ohioans out of work. The good prof says the incoming Trump Administration and Congress needs to take “prompt action” to “speed up the licensing process for companies seeking permits to export liquefied natural gas.” Here, here! We fully agree…
You would think if consumers want natural gas, and private companies are willing to build the pipelines to get the gas to their homes and businesses, such a thing would be possible here in the Land of the Free and the Home of the Brave. However, a trade organization in Connecticut tried to block such activity–in court. What makes it doubly distressing is that the trade organization opposing new natgas pipelines represents heating oil distributors (a sister fossil fuel), afraid that they may lose market share to natural gas. So trade group filed a lawsuit to prevent a state initiative that would expand the state’s natural gas pipeline network. Shame on them. Fortunately the Connecticut Supreme Court ruled–and the heating oil distributors lost…
The “best of the rest” – stories that caught MDN’s eye that you may be interested in reading. In today’s lineup: FERC denies access to loons at Leach XPress vote meeting; Statoil helps fund education in WV; the fact on Virginia’s fracking ‘trade secret’ bill; ETE files motion to stop Army Corps delay tactic of enviro study; Trump’s Interior nominee will consider more drilling on federal land; powergen and LNG joined at the hip; Church of England issues briefing paper on fracking; and more!
It appears to us as if Magnum Hunter Resources, which was founded by former CEO Gary Evans, is shedding the last vestiges of Evans by changing its name. “Wildcatter” Evans grew the company to be worth $1.4 billion in 2013 by borrowing heavily to drill in the Marcellus and Utica shales in West Virginia and Ohio, while at the same time financing the Eureka Hunter Pipeline that gathered and processed its production. Magnum Hunter has/had a number of subsidiary companies, like Eureka Hunter (pipelines), Alpha Hunter (drilling), and GreenHunter (wastewater). But then the price of gas (and oil) crashed, and although Magnum Hunter treaded financial water for a time, they eventually succumbed to bankruptcy in December 2015 (see 
Yesterday MDN’s favorite government agency, the U.S. Energy Information Administration (EIA), issued our favorite monthly report–the Drilling Productivity Report (DPR). The DPR is the EIA’s best guess, based on expert data crunchers, as to how much each of the U.S.’s seven major shale plays will produce for both oil and natural gas in the coming month. For the past three reports, estimating production for November, December, and January, Marcellus natgas has increased. The trend continues in this latest report, which forecasts production for the coming month of February. Last month the EIA predicted natgas production in the Marcellus would zoom up by 160 million cubic feet per day (MMcf/d). This month EIA predicts in the coming month Marcellus production will go up another huge 188 MMcf/d. The #2 gas-producing basin behind the Marcellus is the Permian (in Texas). That basin will also see a big increase in natgas production–an additional 103 MMcf/d–largely because of “associated gas.” The Permian is an oil play and is, by all accounts, the hottest shale play right now because of oil. But when drillers sink holes in the ground, other hydrocarbons come out of the ground along with oil–i.e. natural gas. Ergo, the more oil you drill for and extract, the more natural gas you get along with it. Here are the latest numbers for the major shale plays in the U.S….
Italian company Pietro Fiorentini has been, since 2013, warehousing and selling pressure regulators and valves for the natural gas industry out of rented office space in Wheeling, WV. Pietro Fiorentini actually manufactures the equipment they sell and for the past four years has held an option to purchase land in the Weirton, WV Three Springs Business Park. The company has just gotten off the pot and on Tuesday officials signed the paperwork to buy the land. Pietro Fiorentini will build a $9 million factory on Weirton site to manufacture the equipment they sell. Eventually the manufacturing plant will employ 150 people…
MDN has reported on the Ohio Dormant Minerals Act (DMA) for years. In a nutshell, there are two DMAs in Ohio–one passed in 1989 that went into effect in 1992, and another in 2006 which added certain additional procedural requirements to the 1989 version. The DMA in its various versions provides for mineral rights that had previously been separated from surface rights to transfer back to the surface owner under certain conditions. The problem, for drillers and for landowners in Ohio, is in knowing which set of DMA rules to use (1989 or 2006) in determining who owns the mineral rights. A number of DMA cases went before the Ohio Supreme Court. In September the Ohio Supreme Court ruled in three cases, saying all of the other cases come under those three (see 
In October 2015, Kinder Morgan’s Tennessee Gas Pipeline (TGP) filed their official, full application with the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission (FERC) seeking approval for their Orion Project (see 
Why doesn’t it surprise us that a Republican-in-Name-Only (RINO) State Senator from the 6th District (Bucks County, Philadelphia suburbs) is not only in favor of, but sponsoring a bill to levy a Marcellus-killing severance tax? PA State Senator Robert “Tommy” Tomlinson, an establishment lifer who has been in the state legislature since 1991 (first as a Representative, later as a Senator), sent around a “Co-Sponsorship Memoranda” yesterday asking Democrats, and along with any suckers from the Republican Party, to co-sponsor a bill he plans to introduce calling for a new severance tax on Marcellus drilling. Tommy wants to tax Marcellus drilling an extra 5%, on top of the existing impact fee, which is a severance tax under a different name, to give the money to (you guessed it) teachers unions. Tommy wants transfer millions of dollars out of the pockets of landowners and drillers and into the sinkhole of the failing “unfunded” pension system for state workers and teachers. The instantaneous effect of Tommy’s tax would be to kill all drilling in the state, which apparently doesn’t bother Tommy in the least…
In May, U.S.-based oilfield services company FMC Technologies announced they will merge with their much larger quasi-competitor, France-based Technip, in an all-stock deal that will create a new company called TechnipFMC worth $13 billion (see