PA Royalty Unrest Spreads from Bradford County to Western PA
This week Pennsylvania House Bill (HB) 1391 is back on the docket. At least, that’s what landowners in Bradford County are hoping. As we’ve covered for some time now, there is a growing split between landowners and drillers over abuses in deducting post-production costs from royalty checks. HB 1391 aims to fix that situation by guaranteeing a minimum 12.5% royalty for landowners, regardless of post-production costs. Until now most of the complaints about royalty shafting have come from landowners in Bradford County. But it seems Bradford (in northeastern PA) is not alone in their discontent. Landowners in Washington and Greene counties (western PA) are also upset with diminished royalty checks and are adding their voices to the effort pushing for passage of HB 1391. Does the bill stand a chance of passing this year?…
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We remember watching Marlin Perkins on “Mutual of Omaha’s Wild Kingdom” growing up. For the younger generations, it was a TV program roughly the equivalent of watching today’s Discovery channel. In particular we remember watching a wildebeest being taken down by a pack of jackals. The jackals would watch for an advantage–a wildebeest that was old and slow, or wounded, or maybe too young to keep up with the herd. They would single it out and one after another jump on it to bring it down. That’s the image that floated through our heads as we noticed a sudden surge of law firms filing class action lawsuits against Chesapeake Energy. No, these lawsuits have nothing to do with Chesapeake shorting landowners in their royalty checks–there’s already a bunch of those lawsuits. These lawsuits are new and stem from the recent announcement that the U.S. Department of Justice, Securities and Exchange Commission and even the U.S. Postal Service have launched investigations into Chesapeake (see 
Gas Natural Inc., a local distribution company (LDC), or “gas utility” company has operations in four different states, including Ohio. Gas Natural also owns pipelines and processing facilities. Gas Natural has just sold itself to energy investment firm First Reserve for $139 million…
The “best of the rest” – stories that caught MDN’s eye that you may be interested in reading. In today’s lineup: Shell wants to sell electricity in Ohio; PA’s rig count goes up again; leaked emails shows Hillary knew Russians were backing anti-fracking groups; natgas hits a new 22-month high; what happens when Saudi Arabia quits exporting oil?; and more!
MDN previously reported that the Pennsylvania Department of Environmental Protection (DEP) planned to publish the final regulations in the Oct. 8 Pennsylvania Bulletin (see 
Let’s be honest: Pennsylvania already has a severance tax. It’s called an impact fee + corporate income tax. The combination of the two taxes in PA levies a collective “tax” on drillers as high OR HIGHER than other oil and gas states, like Texas, Oklahoma and Louisiana. To enact a new/extra severance tax on PA drillers, as Democrats like Sen. John Yudichak (Wilkes-Barre area) propose to do, would kill off what little drilling is happening in PA. It would make drilling in PA unprofitable. Yet Yudichak and others in his party see the recent PA Supreme Court decision as an excuse to push, one more time, for a severance tax. What is it about Democrats and their insatiable lust for your money?…
The Baker Hughes rig count, watched closely by those in the industry (the benchmark used across the world) has been trending up in the U.S. since July. BH released their venerable count for September on Friday and once again the counts have gone up–very good news indeed. BH is reporting an average of 509 active rigs in the U.S., up 28 from August. MDN performs its own rig count for the Marcellus/Utica, using BH’s numbers for Pennsylvania, Ohio and West Virginia. The Marcellus/Utica rig count was up for the second month running. In September the M/U rig count jumped up by 7. The biggest gainer was Pennsylvania, up by 5. West Virginia was up by 2, and Ohio stayed even…
In June, Shell announced a final investment decision (FID) to move forward with building a multi-billion dollar ethane cracker plant in Pennsylvania (see 
On Sept. 30 MDN editor Jim Willis attended S&P Global Platts’ 
The refrain is growing louder. In the past couple of weeks MDN editor Jim Willis has heard that Obama’s EPA regulations haven’t killed the coal industry–it was lowly natural gas that slipped in with a knife and did the dirty deed. We first heard that at the recent Benposium East event (see today’s story for Jim’s notes from that event), and also from Our Dear Leader himself, BHO (see 
Events related to drilling in the Marcellus and Utica Shale, primarily pro-drilling.