PA Gov Wolf Searching for New DEP Sec 3 Mo After Firing Quigley
In May (three months ago), Pennsylvania Dept. of Environmental Protection (DEP) Secretary John Quigley was fired for using a PRIVATE email account to collude with his Big Green friends to try and bully PA’s legislators into supporting his onerous proposed regulations (see Smoking Gun: Copy of the Email that Got John Quigley Fired). Richly deserved. The man who took his place as Acting Secretary is Patrick McDonnell, a 19-year veteran of the DEP. We haven’t seen or heard much of McDonnell, but what we have seen and heard (via media reports) seems to be that McDonnell is a “get it done without generating controversy” kind of guy. Radical environmental groups don’t seem overly thrilled with McDonnell as Secretary (see PA’s New Acting Sec DEP: What Do We Know? Will He Be Permanent?). He is a man-made global warming flummery believer, so that’s a strike against him. But a lot of otherwise rational adults believe in such fairy tales, so we won’t hold it against him (too much). One thing is for sure: McDonnell wants to move from “Acting” to permanent Secretary of the DEP. However, it’s not looking promising that Gov. Tom Wolf will make his appointment permanent. It’s now been 90 days since Quigley was given the boot. Wolf has only 90 days to nominate someone. A common practice, when you’re not ready to nominate, is to use a placeholder name. Wolf has done so, and the placeholder name is not McDonnell’s…
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Two weeks ago the Massachusetts Supreme Judicial Court (MA’s highest court) ruled that utility companies, which are heavily regulated and the prices they can charge controlled, cannot pass along the cost of a pipeline to electric ratepayers (see 
Two radical environmental groups in Ohio–Ohio Environmental Council and the Clean Air Task Force–have just released a 100% bogus “report” that attempts to tie asthma in children to fracking. If lying to the public were a crime, they’d be in jail right now. Here’s how these sleazy groups make such a claim: They claim, from looking at medical records, that there are 7,129 childhood asthma attacks in the Columbus metro area, and 7,558 in the Cleveland metro area each year. Absolutely no context as to whether those numbers are higher or lower than elsewhere in the country, or whether or not the numbers are increasing year over year. These groups just toss out numbers. They claim the asthma attacks are because of smog in those cities. They further claim smog comes from burning oil and gas and ergo, childhood asthma attacks are the result of fracking, because fracking extracts more oil and gas which is burned and causes smog which causes asthma. It is a heaping mound of cow manure. The problem is that otherwise good news sources, like the Akron Beacon Journal, push this manure out as news…
The University of Texas at Austin has just been awarded a $350,000 grant from the U.S. Department of Energy to conduct an 18-month review of a study they previously did of major American shale gas plays. Hey, getting paid to look at what you previously wrote is good work if you can get it! The previous study, called the “Shale Production and Reserve Study” looked at data from the Barnett, Fayetteville, Haynesville, and Marcellus natural gas plays. However, the data reviewed in the original study was only 4-6 years’ worth of data, depending on the play. Since the original study was completed, UTA-Austin now has access to an additional 2-4 years’ worth of data. In other words, the new data will help confirm, or not, the original conclusions. More data, better results and better conclusions. Here’s what UTA-Austin had to say about the new grant…
There is precisely one main reason why the United States produces 40% less carbon dioxide now than it did five years ago. Must be the onslaught of solar, right? Nope. How about wind. Yeah, wind power is coming on strong–I see those ugly windmills all over the place now. Must be wind power, right? Nope. Hydro? Nope. Biomass? Nope. There is only one main reason why we pump less CO2 into the atmosphere (if you care about that sort of thing), and it’s this: because fracked shale gas has replaced coal in electric generating plants. You would think environmentalists would celebrate. They don’t and they won’t, pointing out their uber-hypocrisy…
The “best of the rest” – stories that caught MDN’s eye that you may be interested in reading. In today’s lineup: Farm Bureau organizes NEXUS pipeline meetings in OH; why oil production didn’t tank when oil prices did; North American oil prices still “unsustainable” according to Schlumberger; misleading reports on o&g come in many forms; Shell says gas is the future, it WON’T be traded like oil; and more!
EXCO Resources was once a sizable player in the Marcellus. They still have 145,000 net acres in the Marcellus, with 124 horizontal Marcellus wells drilled and in production. However, EXCO, as we pointed out in March, has pretty much abandoned the Marcellus at this point (see 
In December of last year, one of the biggest and brightest stars in the midstream firmament for the Marcellus/Utica, MarkWest Energy, sold itself to Marathon Petroleum (see 
Landmen, the people on the front lines interfacing between drillers and landowners, are facing tough times. With the slowdown in drilling has come a slowdown in leasing, or re-leasing. Landmen are the guys and gals who perform that duty–and many of them are now doing other jobs, waiting and hoping for the next upturn in the industry. Here’s the story and perspective of one landman who has been in the business for the last 37 years, through five different up and down cycles. Most recently he worked as a landman for Noble Energy–until he was laid off 1.5 years ago…
Is unconventional (i.e. shale) natural gas supply more responsive to price changes than conventional gas? A new research paper suggests that the answer is yes–specifically, almost three times as responsive, because shale gas wells are far more productive (2.7x more) than conventional gas wells. In “Trophy Hunting vs. Manufacturing Energy: The Price-Responsiveness of Shale Gas” (full copy below), researchers from Resources for the Future (RFF), a nonpartisan think tank devoted exclusively to natural resource and environmental issues, takes a look at how the “new way” of drilling multiple wells from a single pad, which is akin to a manufacturing process, is flattening out the supply curve. A flattened supply curve reduces price volatility–the wild up and down swings in the commodity price of natgas. While the focus of the paper is on how shale wells are leading to lower and more stable prices over the long term and does a deep dive into economic models, the paper also contains a good, basic primer on drilling a shale well. We found it a good read and wanted to share it with you…