EQT Wins Court Case Against PA DEP re $4.5M Wastewater Leak Fine
In October 2014 the Pennsylvania Dept. of Environmental Protection (DEP) fined PA driller EQT $4.53 million for a leaky wastewater impoundment in Tioga County, PA (see PA DEP Levies Biggest Fine Ever, $4.5M Against EQT). While EQT did not say there wasn’t a problem with leaks at the site, they did say the way the DEP calculated the fine is unreasonable and arbitrary. In fact, EQT says the DEP levied the fine and took EQT to court because a few weeks prior EQT had sued the DEP over a different matter. EQT appealed the fine and the case to PA Supreme Court and a year later the high court handed EQT a “procedural victory” by saying EQT has a point about the manner in which the DEP is calculating the fine (see PA Supreme Court Gives EQT “Procedural Victory” in $4.5M Fine Case). The Supreme Court sent the case back to a lower court, PA Commonwealth Court, for follow up work. The work is done and EQT has won. A three-judge panel ruled that the method the DEP currently uses to assess fines–by how many days pollution lingers, instead of by how many days the initial release of pollution lasted–is not legal nor common sense. The judges said such a method in fining, “would result in potentially limitless continuing violations.” Under the old way of calculating fines, the DEP was considering upping the fine on EQT to an insane $157 million. Calculating it under the new way will mean a fine of around $120,000. This is a major victory for EQT and a reigning in of egregiously overzealous state regulators…
Read More “EQT Wins Court Case Against PA DEP re $4.5M Wastewater Leak Fine”
Yesterday MDN ran an important story about 10 proposed (or already under construction) Utica Shale gas-powered electric plants planned for Ohio (see 
We always find it distressing when companies begin to tap dance to please corporate raiders. That is apparently what is now happening at Marathon Petroleum, owner of MarkWest Energy. We don’t pretend to fully understand what’s happening (this is all high finance stuff), but our impression is that Marathon is “dropping down” certain assets (i.e. moved from one legal corporate entity to another) more quickly than it otherwise would have, due to pressure on the company from Elliott Management, a so-called activist investor in the company. “Activist investor” is what used to be called “corporate raider” 25 years ago, which are companies or people who invest just enough in a company to control it, forcing the company to shed assets and fire people in order to boost the stock price–just to turn around and sell and make a quick buck. Apparently Elliott wants Marathon to a) move assets around from one company to another PDQ, and b) consider spinning out Speedway into its own company, or selling it. Speedway, you may or may not know, is Marathon’s retail gas filling station business. Speedway bought out and merged in the old Hess filling stations (see 
Maryland is a lot like New York–populated with lefty liberals who love to tell other people how to live their lives. Maryland went through a years-long process, just like New York, and eventually released what would likely be the strictest drilling regulations in the nation, in late 2014 (see 
Energy Transfer Equity (ETE), owner of more than 62,500 miles of natural gas and natural gas liquids pipelines, with many miles in the Marcellus/Utica, has just gone a cash-raising bender. ETE is, by the way, the owner of the planned Rover Pipeline–a $3.7 billion, 711-mile Marcellus/Utica natural gas pipeline that will run from PA, WV and eastern OH through OH into Michigan and eventually into Canada. On Monday the company announced they have raised $580 million in cash by selling new 32 million new units (think shares of stock). In addition, yesterday the company said it had floated new notes (IOUs) worth nearly $1.5 billion. Wow! Add it together and the total is over $2 billion–a serious pile of cash. What are they doing with all that cash? Paying off old debt…
As is so often the case, when leftists/liberals claim they are doing one thing, it is, in fact, the opposite they are doing. Case in point: Obama’s Dept. of Energy (DOE) Secretary Ernest “hair” Moniz has released an 11th hour “scientific integrity” policy for the DOE that supposedly inoculates and protects “real” scientists who work for the agency from politics–allowing them to freely vomit their political, whoops, scientific views whenever and wherever they want, without fear of retribution or losing their job. What it does is to set up a situation where the incoming Trump Administration (specifically Rick Perry, the new DOE Secretary) are handcuffed to a bunch of leftists in the department–people who insist on the fairy tale of man-made global warming. If Perry wants to clean house, there will be weeping and wailing and gnashing of teeth, along with lawsuits that it violates agency policy. This is a typical sleazy move by the Obamadroids to dirty things up before they leave town–scorched earth policy. In case you think we’re engaging in hyperbole, the Union of (Liberal) Concerned Scientists are “thrilled” with the new policy. Need we say more?…
The U.S. Energy Information Administration (EIA) is fresh out with analysis of wholesale electricity prices in 2016 and finds electric prices were down for the year primarily because of the low price of natural gas–and the switching currently under way from coal to natgas. EIA says for the first 10 months of last year electric generating plants paid an average of $2.78/Mcf (thousand cubic feet) for natgas–down 17% from the same period in 2015. Because of the ongoing switching from coal to natgas, EIA says electricity generated from natgas power plants rose 6% in the first 10 months compared to the same period a year earlier. The truly astonishing factoid from EIA: “Natural gas was the primary source of U.S. electricity generation (when measured on an annual basis) in 2016 for the first time.” Here’s the full EIA analysis…
The 
The “best of the rest” – stories that caught MDN’s eye that you may be interested in reading. In today’s lineup: Cuomo’s war on NY energy; another round of leases in the Utica Shale in the works; Rex Energy closes on asset sale; Monroe County leads surge in OH drilling permits; PA pipeline on verge of approval; short-term outlook for natgas prices; the next big innovation in oil & gas; and more!
Pennsylvania Gov. Tom Wolf is…what adjective can we use? Recalcitrant. Stubborn. Pigheaded. Stupid. Perhaps all of the above. Wolf is clearly in over his head and the most ineffective PA governor in more than a generation. When he assumed office in 2015, he floated a budget calling for a new 5% severance tax on the Marcellus industry–a tax which even his supporters admitted would be closer to 17% (see 
Enough is enough. As MDN reported last June, anti-drilling zealots in Youngstown, OH filed a petition to place a frack ban resolution on the November ballot–for the 6th time (see 
In June 2015 MDN told you about a really cool plan by a Pennsylvania company to establish a CNG (compressed natural gas) terminal in Lycoming County, PA as a way to get natural gas to manufacturers, fleets and businesses where no pipeline infrastructure now exists (see 
In October EQT announced a deal to buy Trans Energy, Inc., a public pure-play driller in the Marcellus in West Virginia, which will become a wholly-owned subsidiary of EQT (see