PA Democrat In-fighting re Member of Wolf’s Pipeline Task Force
This story is amusing–PA Democrat infighting over the composition of the PA Gov. Tom Wolf’s Pipeline Infrastructure Task Force. You’ll recall we brought you Wolf’s announcement that the PennFuture Secretary of the Dept. of Environmental Protection, John Quigley, would head a new task force to oversee (i.e. slow down) the development of local shale gas gathering pipelines (see Disaster on the Horizon: PA Gov Wolf Creates Pipeline Task Force). In July the DEP announced the list of 42 members of the Task Force, one-third of whom work for Wolf in state government jobs (see PA Gov Wolf Packs Pipeline Task Force with His Own Minions). What we didn’t know is that apparently there was at least one anti-fossil fueler who is so extreme, not even PennFuture’s own John Quigley wanted him on the task force. Scott Cannon, from Luzerne County, PA, was originally invited to be a member of the task force. Cannon is well known as an anti-driller in NEPA, running around with a video camera shooting anti-fracking propaganda films. It seems Cannon’s name somehow got on the list to be invited, and then, suddenly, he was uninvited. All signs point to Quigley, a fellow liberal Democrat, as the one who did the uninviting…
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With fewer new wells being drilled in Pennsylvania, and more inspectors added to the roles at the Dept. of Environmental Protection (DEP), as you might expect, there have been more inspections of existing/older gas and oil wells. In fact, the DEP has conducted 1,700 more inspections over the first seven months of 2015 than they did in 2014. The oil and gas division of the DEP has added 25 new employees in the past 12 months–even though drilling activity has gone down. Typical government boondoggle. You can’t hire people and give them nothing to do. Well, you can, but that doesn’t look good for a new governor. So the DEP has hauled out the magnifying glass to look under every rock on the well pad. And what have they found? Despite 16% more inspections of shale operations this year, the total number of violations has gone down–from 283 violations for the first seven months of 2014, to 205 violations for the first seven months in 2015. However, violations for conventional drillers over the same period have gone up…
The Philadelphia-based anti-fossil fuel group Clean Air Council has announced through their media/public relations mouthpiece (the taxpayer-funded PBS StateImpact Pennsylvania) that they’ve launched yet another frivolous lawsuit–this time against Sunoco Logistics and their Mariner East 2 pipeline plan. Clean Air Council has launched so many lawsuits against the oil and gas industry we’ve lost count of the number. The Clean Air Council, once called The Delaware Valley Citizens’ Council for Clean Air, is a non-profit (i.e. non-taxed) group engaging in political activity in violation of their non-profit charter–yet government officials ignore those violations. The Clean Air Council, without standing, filed a lawsuit in the Philadelphia Court of Common Pleas (the lowest trial court, essentially what other states call county court), charging that Sunoco Logistics, contrary to decades of accepted recognition as a public utility in Pennsylvania, is not actually a public utility and therefore cannot assert eminent domain against a few holdout landowners who refuse to allow the Mariner East 2 pipeline to be placed next to the existing Mariner East 1 pipeline already crossing their land…
The New England Coalition for Affordable Energy, a pro-fossil fuel group backed by business groups and unions in throughout all six New England states, issued the results of a study they commissioned that asks the question, What will happen in New England if energy infrastructure, like natural gas pipelines, does not get built? The study, titled “The Economic Impacts of Failing to Build Energy Infrastructure in New England” (full copy below), finds the impacts–if these projects are not built–are dire: Electric ratepayers will pay $5.4 billion in higher electricity costs; 52,000 private sector jobs will be lost; household spending will go down a collective $12.5 billion; $9 billion of investment and 115,600 jobs that would have been created by such projects will never happen; and the list goes on. Here’s the announcement and summary of the findings, followed by a full copy of the study…
Once again the issue of “foreigners” taking jobs away from “locals” is rearing its ugly head. Over the past few years the pace of drilling and the construction of infrastructure like pipelines and compressor stations has been so rapid, the fact that companies import experienced workers from other states like Texas, Oklahoma and Louisiana didn’t seem to bother anyone. Now that drilling rigs are being laid down and pipeline construction is slowing, local union workers who are out of work are questioning why they don’t get the remaining jobs first, ahead of the out-of-towners…
The 19-member West Virginia Oil and Natural Gas Industry Safety Commission, a group created by an executive order from Gov. Earl Ray Tomblin, met for the first time on August 13 (see 
It is time to get involved in the fight to end climate change madness that has metastasized in the brains of lunatic Democrats like Barack Hussein Obama. Paul Driessen, senior policy adviser for the Committee For A Constructive Tomorrow (CFACT) which sponsors the All Pain No Gain petition against global-warming hype, and a senior policy adviser to the Congress of Racial Equality, and author of Eco-Imperialism: Green Power – Black Death, writes in a new column that there ARE climate issues we need to fix: the climate of fraud, corruption, and policies that kill jobs, hope and yes, kill people too. Paul doesn’t hold back. He has analyzed Obama’s recently released Clean Power Plan (CPP) and finds that if Obama’s plan is allowed to stand, it will limit the use of natural gas in electric power plants by 22% above 2012 levels until 2022, and after that, it limits natgas to only a 5% increase. In other words, Obama wants to choose how the electricity you use gets generated, instead of letting the free market choose. It’s obscene. It’s tyranny. It’s dictatorial. And, frankly, it’s un-American. Here’s how Paul’s latest column begins…
Halcon Resources, with with some 140,000 net acres in the Ohio Utica Shale, said in January they would not do any Utica drilling in 2015 (see 
A potentially troubling development in Penn Township (Westmoreland County), PA. Apex Energy had a permit from the PA Dept. of Environmental Protection to drill a Marcellus Shale well in Penn Twp. An anti-drilling group called Protect PT filed a lawsuit against the town for allowing the well to be drilled with first requiring a full environmental impact statement (EIS)–something that drives up the cost of drilling a well. The town caved to pressure and withdrew permission to drill, so Apex also sued the town. A deal has been worked out. Apex will have to pay for and conduct an EIS, and then they will be allowed to drill. Other towns populated with anti-drillers are catching wind of it and eyeing it as a potential way to slow or stop drilling in their towns…
Welcome to Friday. It’s time for a brief tutorial on “short selling” or “going short” in the stock market. Even if you don’t participate in the stock market, you need to pay attention if you work for a Marcellus driller or other publicly traded company that sells to or is part of the industry. You also need to pay attention if you are leased with a Marcellus driller. A company’s stock price is key to the value of the company–something called its market capitalization. The more a company is worth (the more “market cap” it has) the more it can borrow when it needs to for things like drilling new wells. A bigger market cap also means a company can borrow money at a lower interest rate (more collateral/value, less risk). Let’s take a look at the recent market gyrations and how those gyrations have encouraged something called short selling of Marcellus-related stocks…
A hilarious “Boo! Scared Ya” report has just been issued by the brainiacs at Penn State that says Pennsylvanians are all going to fry by 2050 because of mythical man-made global warming. Never mind these are the same people who have made the same predictions going back 25 years (average temps haven’t gone up now for 18 years and counting). Never mind these are the same people who can’t predict the weather next week, let alone 35 years from now. We’re just supposed to believe them because they have letters after their names, supposedly indicating they’re smart. One person has fallen for this erroneous garbage: the PennFuture Secretary of the Dept. of Environmental Protection, John Quigley. Unfortunately Quigley has the power to make drillers’ lives miserable by enacting draconian regulations to control their activities because he believes in the fairy tale of global warming. That not only makes him stupid, it makes him dangerous…
In May, MDN told you the maddening news that the federal Environmental Protection Agency had, once again, illegally grabbed power not granted to them under the Constitution by redefining what are “waters of the United States” (see