Virginia Tech/NETL Cabon Dioxide Research Benefits Shale Drillers
It’s amazing what lengths otherwise rational-thinking adults will go to, to dispose of carbon dioxide–the stuff you breathe out with every breath you take. Global warmists believe an abundance of CO2 in the atmosphere will lead to global warming and toast Mother Earth (even though average global temps haven’t increased in nearly 19 years now, an inconvenient truth for warmists that they avoid addressing). Sometimes this strange behavior of trying to dispose of CO2 is actually beneficial to the shale industry. Researchers from Virginia Tech have teamed with the National Energy Technology Laboratory (NETL) on a multi-part project to investigate the feasibility of injecting captured CO2 into shale and other rock layers. The experiments, which so far are showing great promise, inject CO2 into the rock forcing natural gas out of the rock and to the surface–and locking away the nefarious CO2 underground where it will stay until a couple of hundred years from now when someone figures out how to use CO2 as an energy source and they go after it again…
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The U.S. Energy Information Administration (EIA), our favorite government agency, is celebrating World Statistics Day by publishing a 20-question quiz about energy statistics. Let’s have a little fun! We’ve reproduced the quiz below. Give it a try and test your energy IQ. We didn’t keep score, but have to confess we got about as many wrong as we did right! Can you do better?…
The “best of the rest” – stories that caught MDN’s eye that you may be interested in reading. In today’s lineup: FERC OK’s PA/NY pipeline to go online; uncompleted Marcellus wells the new storage; US Supreme Court looks at Maryland power plant deal; Emera gets DOE approval for CNG exports from Florida; enviro lawyers unhappy with FERC; are MLPs history?; and more!
In January 2014 Hess Corporation sold 74,000 of its 95,000 100%-owned Utica Shale acreage leases to Aubrey McClendon’s American Energy Partners for $924 million (see 
There are some 408 parks that are part of the National Park System in the United States. The National Park Service (NPS) is the government agency charged with managing those parks. The NPS has just put everyone on notice that new regulations for oil and gas drilling on and under those parks is coming. In some cases mineral rights are not owned by the government and drilling does happen on or under the parks. Oil and gas drilling currently happens in 12 of the 408 parks, including drilling operations in the Cuyahoga Valley National Park between Akron and Cleveland in Northeast Ohio. Just over half of the drilling operations happening in those 12 National Parks is exempt from NPS regulations. In an annoucement (below), the NPS said (1) we’re about to make drilling regs more strict, and (2) the new regs will apply to all drilling in all National Parks, including the places where it’s currently exempt from NPS rules–even if the mineral rights are not owned by the NPS. It is another power grab by the federal government. The Bureau of Land Management (BLM) tried this tactic with non-park federal lands–a move that landed it in court (see 
In a sit-down in September with the editors of the Washington Observer-Reporter (near Pittsburgh), the PennFuture Secretary of the Pennsylvania Dept. of Environmental Protection, John Quigley, was reported to have said the following: “He [Quigley] is proposing to create an office of environmental justice within the department and hire “the right individual” to advise him on policy” (see 
It continues to be tough times at Halliburton. Although the company is in the process of buying smaller competitor Baker Hughes, Halliburton themselves are having a hard time keeping their proverbial nose above water. In the third quarter of 2015 the company lost $54 million and laid off another 2,000 employees. Earlier this year Halliburton laid off 10% of its workforce–some 9,000 people (see 
A complicated court case just decided by Pennsylvania Superior Court has implications for all land and mineral rights owners in PA. The case is called Wright v. Misty Mountain Farm LLC. This is how we understand it. In 1950 Fred and Jeanetta Buck sold some property in Bradford County, PA to Robert and Marjorie Wright. However, the Bucks kept the oil/gas/mineral rights for themselves, having already leased the mineral rights for the property. The mineral rights lease eventually expired in 1971. At that time, Robert and Marjorie Wright, the surface owners, figured with the expiration of the lease, the mineral rights reverted to them–so they signed a lease to allow oil and gas drilling. In 1988 the Wrights signed over the property and the lease to David and Patricia Wright (we’re assuming son and daughter-in-law). David and Patricia signed new leases on the property in both 2001 and again in 2005. Eventually Jeanetta Buck died and in 2010 while reviewing her estate and its assets, Shirley Matthews, administratrix of the estate, discovered/claimed the mineral rights still belonged to the Bucks. So Matthews conveyed the subsurface mineral rights to Misty Mountain Farm LLC. Patricia Wright argued that the when the original lease made by the Bucks in 1950 expired, ownership of the mineral rights also expired–in 1971. A lower court and then the Superior Court disagreed and ruled that unless there is specific language saying that when a lease expires so too do the mineral rights, then the mineral rights still belong to the original rights owner. Whew. Get all that? Bottom line: Just because a lease expires it doesn’t mean the party who owns the mineral rights loses their claim on those rights…
MDN editor Jim Willis still remembers the thunderclap of understanding he experienced while attending the Platts Global Energy Outlook Forum in New York City in December of 2013 (see 
In December President Obama will travel to Paris to sign a climate treaty that forfeits the sovereignty of the United States of America–the country he swore to protect. The Paris climate treaty is another in a long line of attempts (like Kyoto) to convince stupid Americans to give up the right to control their own country and destiny–to sell ourselves out and let non-American, un-elected socialists from other countries determine how we will live in the future. They use the bogeyman myth of global warming to do it. They are all aiming to commit mass energy suicide by outlawing fossil fuels–but it won’t work if we don’t play along. We pray Congress stops this madness, but now we despair. You see, big business is in bed with big government and funds the political ruling class in Washington and in return the politicians pass laws favorable to them. Some 81 of the biggest big businesses (who contribute heavily to Congress and receive preferential treatment in return) have signed on to a pact to support Obama’s climate madness. They actually want him to sign the treaty that gives up our national sovereignty. Without these 81 big businesses (full list below) you literally could not live–from Walmart to Hershey to Nike to Apple to Google to Kellogg’s to American Express…the list goes on. Sadly, even some in our own industry have signed on, including Invenergy. Shame on them. If we were to boycott them (as should happen) we’d have to live like hermits in the wilderness. No one can live without the goods and services provided by this list of 81 mega corporations. And each and every one of them have sold us out. It’s truly a sad and depressing day…
A study titled “Endocrine-Disrupting Activity of Hydraulic Fracturing Chemicals and Adverse Health Outcomes After Prenatal Exposure in Male Mice” was published last week in the journal Endocrinology (abstract below). This one is fall-right-out-of-your-chair-laughing funny! The study attempts to make a link between fracking and low sperm counts in men by exposing mice (yes, mice were harmed in the making of this study!) with chemicals used in fracking. Thing is, they overdosed the mice–using far more chemicals at higher doses than are ever used in fracking fluids. That’s just one of the many problems with this new “study.” There are plenty of other problems too, including the raging conflicts of interest for the anti-driller who was the supervising “researcher” for the study…
A deadline is fast approaching in New York State. Next Tuesday, Oct. 27, the natural gas industry must file an “Article 78” lawsuit or lose its opportunity to do so. Last December NY Gov. Andrew Cuomo made a non-science, political decision to ban fracking in the state (see 
The radical leftist PA-based group Community Environmental Legal Defense Fund (CELDF) does its best to trick townships into passing illegal bans. In 2013 the CELDF fooled Highland Township in Elk County, PA into passing a ban on wastewater injection wells. They also tricked Grant Township in Indiana County, PA to do the same thing. Both towns are in court defending their illegal actions. One of the idiotic legal tactics used by the CELDF in both cases is to claim that an ecosystem is a “person” under the law–a person who can file to join the town’s lawsuit in an effort to protect itself (see 
Last year International Paper’s Ticonderoga mill in northern New York, near the Vermont border, received $1.75 million in grant money from Andrew Cuomo and New York State (that is to say, from we the taxpayers) to help with an $11 million project to convert the plant from using oil to using natural gas (see the Albany Times Union story: 
Floridian Jeb Bush is running for President as a Republican–necessary to state the obvious because many are likely not aware of Jeb’s candidacy since his poll numbers are in the single digits. Jeb was a guest at Rice Energy near Pittsburgh in September to unveil his energy policy plan (see