Rumor: Chief Oil & Gas has Closed it’s Marcellus Office Near Pittsburgh
This is breaking news. MDN has received a tip that Chief Oil & Gas, a sizable and active driller in the Pennsylvania Marcellus Shale, has just closed its Appalachian regional office in Wexford, PA (near Pittsburgh). Unfortunately we don’t have any further details at this time. We don’t know what it means for the future of Chief’s Marcellus drilling program. We don’t know what has happened to Chief’s workers. Stay tuned and we’ll bring you more when we hear more. Below is a chart from the 2015 Marcellus and Utica Shale Databook (Vol. 1) showing the number of permits for Marcellus wells by Chief going back to the beginning of 2013…
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The Ohio Utica Shale has just passed a major milestone on its way into the history books. There are now more than 1,000 producing Utica Shale wells in Ohio, with nearly another 1,000 permitted (with half of those already drilled). Although the pace of drilling has slowed, the Utica is turning out to be a worthy rival to the Marcellus. It’s not there yet! But keep a close eye on the Utica. The Utica may one day surpass the Marcellus in production, given the incredible volumes of gas that come from Utica wells…
Shell continues to act as if it has already made the decision to build a $2-$3 billion ethane cracker plant complex in Beaver County, PA, even though they continue to refuse to say they’ve made a decision. What’s our evidence? In June Shell finally purchased the land where the cracker will be built, the former Horsehead zinc smelter property in Potter that will be the primary location of the cracker plant IF it gets built (see 
A Pennsylvania Democrat in Republican clothing, Gene DiGirolamo (“Republican” House member from the Philadelphia area), along with a hard-left Democrat, Steve Stroman (director of Penn’s Woods Conservation Advocates), have penned a “bipartisan” column in the Harrisburg Patriot-News on how a “principled” and “reasonable” severance tax compromise will create education nirvana in Pennsylvania. The column is so shot full of lies we can’t even begin to count them. This is pure propaganda from two lefties who want to tax and spend PA into the ground once again, as it existed under Ed Rendell before Tom Corbett fixed it by cutting excessive and out-of-control education spending. Our pair of lefties say just a piddly little 3.2% severance tax will be all that’s required–even though until now nothing less than 5% (actually it turns out to be 17.3%, see 
A very old and trite but true saying: Q: How do you know when a politician, like NY Gov. Andrew Cuomo, is lying? A: When he opens his mouth. Our illustrious man-child governor was in Syracuse yesterday to drop off a bag of money with $50 million, and an impertinent reporter had the gall to ask His Lordship about the secession rally held in Chenango County on Sunday (see 
Last October MDN told you about an exciting project from Boardwalk Pipeline Partners’ Texas Gas Transmission pipeline that will reverse the flow from the Louisiana Gulf Coast all the way to Ohio (see 
Weeping. Wailing. Gnashing of teeth. Ripping clothes and sitting in sackcloth and ashes. That’s some of the reaction from lunatic anti-fossil fuelers in Massachusetts after the Mass. Dept. of Public Utilities (DPU) approved long-term contracts for three utilities–Berkshire Gas, National Grid and Columbia Gas–to buy natural gas supplies from the hated, evil Kinder Morgan Northeast Energy Direct pipeline. That is, the three utilities will buy more gas from Kinder IF the pipeline ever gets built. We’re still a long way from backhoes digging up ground to lay new pipeline, but we’ve just taken a big step forward with this decision by the DPU. What’s next for the loons of Mass? Yep–you guessed it. They’re planning to take the DPU to court…
Compressor stations in Ohio, needed to flow natural gas through numerous new pipelines being built, require a permit from the Ohio Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) in order to get built. The Ohio EPA considers each application independently, a laborious and long process. In an effort to streamline that process, the Ohio EPA is accepting comments during a “pre-comment” period from now until September 18 on a plan to issue general permits for compressor stations. A general permit is, essentially, a cookie cutter approach. If midstream companies agree to the provisions in the general permit, they will use certain types of equipment and certain standards, allowing the permit process to speed along much faster. Once the pre-comment (in essence, give us your feedback) period is over, the EPA will issue draft “final” general permits for full public comment, which will run for 30 days…
Pennsylvania-based Marcellus driller Rex Energy, which we’ve long called our “little energy company that could, and does,” has taken a beating in the stock market. Rex’s stock is down more than 80% over the past year (down 37% in the past 3 months) and the company appears on David Fessler’s “Oil Company Death List” (see 
Hats off to Dominion, a major natural gas utility and midstream (i.e. pipeline) company operating in Connecticut, Maryland, New York, North Carolina, Ohio, Pennsylvania, Rhode Island, South Carolina, Virginia, West Virginia and the District of Columbia–essentially operating in the Marcellus/Utica region. We’ve noted on a number of occasions the generosity of Dominion with their philanthropy (see 
Democrats in Pennsylvania, in their desperation to sink a money well into Marcellus drillers to fund Big Education and teachers’ unions, have gotten even nuttier than they usually are. So nutty, we’re laughing out loud–at them. Representative Patty Kim (D-Dauphin), someone whose constituents voted for her to go to Harrisburg to get work done, has decided she would rather dance than do the hard work she was sent to Harrisburg to do. Kim’s eight year-old daughter told her mom about the Nae Nae after returning home from summer camp. It gave Kim her latest “brilliant” idea. What’s the Nae Nae? It’s a dance routine, apparently. So Kim, hoping to make a viral Youtube video, enlisted six other legislators, all of them hardened Democrats in favor of a Marcellus-killing severance tax, to dance the Nae Nae with her, on camera, making asses of themselves (watch it below). The message at the end of the video requests viewers to ask their legislators to support a Marcellus-killing severance tax. Kim used $1,000 of her own campaign funds, funds given to her by contributors who thought she was a serious candidate, to make this silly video. At one point the video also films children in a dance routine. What a shame to trick innocent children into supporting your own twisted political agenda. But that’s how Dems operate–brainwash ’em early and often…
We don’t know how he does it, but it seems Aubrey McClendon can charm money out of just about anyone. Not even two weeks ago we told you that McClendon cut a deal to lease 21.5 million acres in Australia for shale drilling (see 
Do #UpstateLivesMatter? Apparently not to New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo. Upstaters are officially fed up with being told what they can and can’t do–through the prism of New York City liberal values. New York City gets its water supply from upstate and therefore believes upstate is nothing more than a serfdom–its residents exist at the pleasure and will (and direction) of their overlords in NYC. We are at the beck and call of downstate–here only to serve at their leisure. One way downstate is controlling upstate is Gov. Cuomo’s attempt to disarm the citizens of the state, denying them their Constitutional right to bear arms (no doubt afraid of that power) via the misnamed SAFE Act. Cuomo also told upstaters they can’t drill for natural gas under their own land–sentencing family farms to a life of poverty–in the name of environmental and “public health” protection. Upstaters have had enough of downstate interference and are pushing to have their counties either secede and join the great state of Pennsylvania, or divide the state into two autonomous districts, each with their own governor. It’s not as far-fetched as it sounds. What started as a fringe movement is going mainstream, as evidenced by a rally held this past Sunday in Bainbridge, NY. The secede or divide movement has anti-frackers worried…
A dozen aging protesters (some of them former hippies) paced back and forth with apparently with nothing better to do, in front of an office building in Pittsfield, Massachusetts where Kinder Morgan has a small office. The protesters were there to demand that New Englanders continue to pay 4x what everyone else across the country pays for electricity, and to protest in favor of rolling blackouts in New England when electricity supplies dip because of high demand and lack of generating capacity, and to protest the availability of abundant, cheap, and clean-burning natural gas to heat their homes. Yep, they are stark, raving mad–and taken seriously by the liberal media in Massachusetts which covers this tiny minority of wackos as if they represent “everybody” in New England. The protesters, in their own words, told reporters why they oppose Kinder Morgan’s Northeast Energy Direct pipeline that will bring cheap, abundant and clean-burning Marcellus Shale gas to Massachusetts and other New England states: because they hate all fossil fuels, including clean-burning natural gas…