Binghamton Newspaper Extreme Anti-Drilling Bias on Display
This is what passes for “journalism” at the Binghamton Press & Sun-Bulletin (P&SB), MDN’s hometown newspaper. Once upon a time the P&SB had a lefty reporter working for them, Tom Wilber. We’ve highlighted Tom’s anti-fracking articles in the past. Tom is a good writer, and fancied himself an Author, so he left the P&SB to write a book on fracking, “Under the Surface: Fracking, Fortunes, and the Fate of the Marcellus Shale.” Perhaps Tom thought he could retire in style after attacking shale energy. The book bombed. Tom had to get a day job again and ended up working for the P&SB (surprise!). He recently penned a rehashed diatribe against shale drilling in a series on shale energy appearing in the pages of the P&SB. We found it, quite frankly, boring. If we’re bored, you will be too–which is why we didn’t bother to comment on the series. Fortunately, MDN friends Tom Shepstone and others “took one for the team” and analyzed Tom’s latest anti-drilling diatribe (see NGN: Is That All There Is, Tom Wilber?). Tom (Shepstone) deserves hazard pay for reading it all. Our point: Tom Wilber is what the P&SB considers to be a fair, impartial journalist. Well, no they don’t, not really. They know he’s as biased and unfair as the editors at the P&SB, which is why they run his articles. They present his work as impartial journalism. To further highlight just how unfair and biased the P&SB is, we spotted two opinion pieces in the Sunday edition (yesterday). You know how newspapers run side-by-side “for and against” op-ed pieces? This time it was “against and against”–both op-eds were against fracking and shale energy. That’s what passes for “fair” in the P&SB…
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In a somewhat complicated scam, a former landman for XTO Energy, Steven E. Fisackerly (33 years old) defrauded XTO out of more than $1 million with fake lease deals in the West Virginia Marcellus Shale region. He cooked up bogus documents and passed them off as real, pocketing commissions. He even worked with a supposed/fake mineral rights owner to pocket kickbacks from lease payments sent to the fake rights owner. It was elaborate and convoluted–and ultimately stupid. Fisackerly plead guilty in May and will enter prison on January 4. His sentence? Pay back more than $1 million he defrauded from XTO, and serve 63 months (over 5 years) in federal prison…
Just last week we told you it’s getting so bad out there because of the low price of oil and gas, that even some law firms are closing down. We told you that Burleson LLP, headquartered in Houston but with a sizable office they opened in Pittsburgh six years ago, is shutting down all of their offices, including Pittsburgh (see 
Yesterday National Fuel Gas Company, the utility giant headquartered in Buffalo, NY and parent of Marcellus driller Seneca Resources, announced that Seneca has partnered up with energy investor IOG Capital to essentially fund Seneca’s Marcellus drilling program in Elk, McKean and Cameron counties in north-central Pennsylvania. The outlines of the deal are thus: IOG will provide the cash and Seneca will do the drilling on up to 80 Marcellus wells on 10,500 acres in the Clermont/Rich Valley area of PA. IOG will get an 80% working interest in the wells. In addition to drilling the wells, National Fuel’s midstream subsidiary will connect the wells and get the gas to market. What this deal means is that Marcellus drilling activity in the Clermont/Rich Valley area will pick up over the few years. Here’s the details of this somewhat complicated deal…