Shell Paying $69M to Move Water Plant for Cracker Project
Shell is currently spending an undisclosed amount of money (millions of dollars) to build a bridge to a site they now own where they may one day build a $2-$3 billion ethane cracker plant in Beaver County, PA (see Shell Begins Building Bridge to PA Cracker Plant Site). Shell is also reportedly spending $80 million to clean up the site (see Shell Paying $80M to Clean Up PA Site for Ethane Cracker Plant). In yet one more positive sign that the project will happen, Shell is spending $69 million to move a water intake site and build a new water treatment site for Center Township–because the current water intake is on the site Shell owns–and Shell needs extra capacity for water treatment. You don’t spend hundreds of millions of dollars to walk away from a project, in our humble opinion…
Read More “Shell Paying $69M to Move Water Plant for Cracker Project”
As a general rule, professional actors are some of the most clueless people on the planet. Mark Ruffalo, one of the most clueless of the clueless, was honored at a Pennsylvania college because of it. Ruffalo was honored by Dickinson College in Carlisle, PA (near Harrisburg) with the Sam Rose ’58 and Julie Walters Prize for his environmental cluelessism, er, a, activism. Hey, Ruffalo does a decent job with acting (we enjoy the Avengers movies)–we’ll grant him that. But have you ever noticed the lights are all on with Ruffalo–but nobody’s actually home? Anywho, the awarded Ruffalo, who calls himself “an accidental environmentalist,” will make a trip to Harrisburg today to deliver a letter from “100 organizations” and “25,000 concerned citizens” to Pennsylvania Gov. Tom Wolf. The letter will ask Wolf to immediately enact a fracking moratorium in the state. What…radical? No way that will ever happen? Pipe dream? You may have forgetten (but we didn’t) that the Pennsylvania State Democrat Party, before they nominated Wolf to be their leader, adopted an official plank in the party platform calling for the same identical thing (see 
Last week we told you how heartbreaking it is to see well-meaning (but ignorant) county officials in Stokes County, NC pass a three-year moratorium on fracking–repeating the same mistakes made in New York State (see 
For those of us who concentrate on the natural gas (and oil) industry, it’s sometimes easy to forget that CONSOL Energy, with major drilling operations in the Marcellus and Utica Shale, began life and is still one of the country’s largest coal companies. We’ve been telling you for years that the company is transitioning from being a coal company to being a natgas company (see 
FirstEnergy Corp., an electric utility operating in the Appalachian region, announced yesterday they will construct a new substation near Smithfield, WV along with a new two-mile transmission line–in order to send more electricity to a nearby natural gas processing plant. FirstEnergy is spending $63 million to build the new substation and transmission line. The announcement doesn’t name the owner of the natgas processing plant, but we have a guess…
Hybrid Tool Solutions has just sold itself to a venture capital firm by the name of Hastings Equity Partners for an undisclosed amount of money. Hybrid Tool, headquartered in Oklahoma, has major operations in the Marcellus/Utica. The company has a patent pending, unique process for conducting frac plug drill outs. What the heck is that? Along the horizontal section of an underground bore hole, plugs are inserted every so often in order to wall off a section of the pipe where fracking will be done. The plugs divide the pipe into sections so each section can be worked on separately–starting with the section furthest out (the “toe”). After all sections are fracked, a drill is put down the hole to drill out the frac plugs and release the gas to the wellhead, putting the well into production. It is that process of drilling out the frac plugs that Hybrid performs, having done over 800 wells in the Marcellus/Utica over the past two years. By selling themselves (essentially getting new funding), they plan to expand beyond the northeast into other shale plays…
The Center for Liquefied Natural Gas (CLNG) released a new report earlier this week that purportedly shows the global environmental benefits of exporting LNG. The Pace Global-authored report, titled “LNG and Coal Life Cycle Assessment of Greenhouse Gas Emissions” (full copy below) found greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions from coal-generated electrical power to be 92 percent to 194 percent higher than from power generated from U.S.-produced LNG in five key international markets. Yes, CLNG is targeting another fossil fuel, coal, to justify itself–which is not a healthy thing in our opinion. Everyone (except 
A story we first brought you back in March continues to play out. Liberty Natural Gas filed a plan back in 2010, prior to the Marcellus Shale revolution, to construct an off-shore LNG import (not export) facility off the coast of New York and New Jersey–in the ocean. A floating LNG facility called the Port Ambrose project. A pipeline would run from the off-shore terminal to Jones Beach, NY and from there would connect to a Transco pipeline lateral. Anti-fossil fuelers who hate and oppose all fracking (indeed all fossil fuel use) are also opposed to this project. So what did Liberty Natural Gas do? They tried to convince the antis that importing gas from Trinidad is better than using nasty, evil, vile “fracked” gas (see 
It’s time to enter the 2016 Northeast Oil & Gas Awards contest! As in previous years, Marcellus Drilling News is pleased to promote the annual Oil & Gas Awards for the northeast, held each year in Pittsburgh. The 2016 event will be held on March 30 and nominations for 25 different categories are now open (see the list below). It costs nothing to nominate your own company–or someone else’s company–for an award. Finalists for each award are asked to sponsor a table at a gala ball/event (that’s how the event is paid for). It’s time to take a shot at having worthy companies–yours or someone else’s–recognized for the good work done in our beloved industry…
The “best of the rest” – stories that caught MDN’s eye that you may be interested in reading. In today’s lineup: New York using more fracked gas than ever; OH judge backs NEXUS pipeline; Youngstown mayor against ‘bill of rights’; landowner royalty audits; WV severance tax revenues falling; Josh Fox wants to help oil workers by putting them out of work; FERC commissioner resigns; panic in the pipelines; and more!
In July MDN reported that GreenHunter Resources–the water resource, waste management, and environmental services subsidiary of Magnum Hunter Resources in the Marcellus/Utica–had brought two new wastewater injection wells online at their Mills Hunter facility in Meigs County, OH (see 
This week should tell us a lot about the future of a severance tax in Pennsylvania–at least the near-term (this year) future. PA Gov. Tom Wolf, a failed governor who’s only been in office for 10 months, is demanding a high severance tax on top of an already high impact fee (the equivalent of a severance tax) in order to pay back teachers’ unions for voting him into office. He’s playing a dangerous game of chicken–dangerous for education, dangerous for all of the agencies without money to operate, dangerous for every citizen in the Commonwealth. Today Wolf will float yet another budget calling for a high severance tax and it will get voted on tomorrow. Prospects for Wolf passing his budget, even though he’s been lobbying RINOs in the House and Senate (bribing them with political promises), don’t look good. In an act of supreme hubris, Wolf says if he loses this vote, Pennsylvania loses. We say it’s the opposite…
In June MDN told you about an idea “whose time has come”–legislation in Pennsylvania that will allow drillers to use acid mine water (AMW) from abandoned coal mines as fracking fluid, reducing the need for using fresh water sources (see 
It appears to us that the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers (USACE) has just made it harder for drillers and pipeline companies operating in Pennsylvania to do their job–although we’re not 100% sure. Last week the USACE issued a public notice about revisions to the Pennsylvania State Programmatic General Permit – 4 (PASPGP-4). According to the legal beagles at Babst Calland, “PASPGP-4 authorizes the discharge of dredged or fill materials and the placement of temporary or permanent structures that result in impacts to one acre or less of waters of the United States, including jurisdictional wetlands.” The USACE has added more threatened and endangered species, as listed on the Pennsylvania Natural Diversity Inventory (PNDI), to the PASPGP-4, meaning there’s more bats and bugs and other critters drillers and pipeliners must avoid when moving earth and cutting down trees. At least that’s what we think is happening. The USACE says it’s “streamlining” the review process. Looks to us like what they’re doing is adding more hoops the oil and gas industry must jump through…