Williams Still Can’t Find Leak in 4-inch WV Condensate Pipeline
Ten days ago heavy rains in West Virginia led to two Williams pipelines rupturing within hours of each other–both in Marshall County (see 2 Williams Pipelines Rupture in Marshall County After Heavy Rains). One pipeline was a 12-inch gathering line for natural gas. The other was a 4-inch condensate pipeline that ended up spilling around 132 barrels of condensate that ended up in nearby Little Grave Creek (see WV DEP to Fine Williams for Condensate Pipeline Leak in WV). Although the WV DEP has rushed to assess a fine because of the condensate spill, they may be putting the cart before the horse. Williams hasn’t yet located where the leak occurred in the 4-inch condensate pipeline…
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Earth Day was celebrated in 192 countries around the world yesterday, including the U.S. We celebrate old Mother Earth here at MDN HQ each and every day. We love this dirt ball on which we live. An MDN reader and friend sent us a link to a Youtube video that properly celebrates and provides context for Earth Day (watch it below). To properly celebrate Earth Day, you need to include a celebration of fossil fuels–which have done more to clean up the earth than any other factor. Yes, you read that right. Fossil fuels are the reason we have cleaner air, cleaner water and live longer than ever. So today, one day late, we celebrate “setting fire to corpses of animals and plants unearthed from 400 million-year-old cemeteries”–which is how anti-driller Sandra Steingraber describes fossil fuels…
As MDN told you last week, natural gas production in Pennsylvania went DOWN from January to February 2015 (see 
Wow–who woulda thunk? Drillers in West Virginia paid double the amount of revenue in severance taxes in 2014 than they did in 2013–a total of $188 million. Those numbers are approaching the total haul for the tax/impact fee in Pennsylvania (a little over $200 million each year). But there’s a big difference between the revenue raised in WV and PA. In PA, 60% of the revenue raised stays local with the towns and counties where drilling occurs, and 40% goes to the state and other geographies. We call the 40% “walking around money” (i.e. extortion) that politicians had to agree to in order to get any kind of deal done that remotely approaches common sense. In WV however, an eye-popping 90% of the severance revenue raised goes to the state–to disappear through politicians’ fingers–while a meager 7.5% stays in the counties that see drilling…
More troubling talk from Odebrecht about a proposed ethane cracker plant in Parkersburg, WV. In February, MDN brought you the first tremors in what until that point had been nothing but positive signs the project would move forward (see 
How low will it go? Data from the Pennsylvania Dept. of Environmental Protection (DEP) shows a significant drop in the number of Marcellus Shale drilling permits issued for the first quarter of 2015. In fact, the number of permits issued dropped 30% in 1Q15–to the lowest number of permits issued in the past five years. Here’s a look at the numbers…
One more twist in what is shaping up to be a very long process to build the state’s largest electric generating plant powered by Marcellus Shale gas. Invenergy hopes to build the 1500-megawatt plant in the borough of Jessup (Lackawanna County), near Scranton, on an 80-acre former coal mine and landfill site (see 
Aubrey McClendon, former CEO of Chesapeake Energy, current CEO of American Energy Partners and the media’s favorite bad boy of fracking–knows a thing or two about developing a deep bench. In addition to Aubrey’s focus on natural gas drilling, he’s one of the co-owners of the Oklahoma City Thunder NBA basketball team. So Aubrey knows it’s good to have a lot of talent on the bench and in the game. In that spirit, Aubrey has just made three more hires to, as he says, “broaden and deepen” his management team. Yesterday American Energy Partners announced that it has hired Scott D. Sachs as Senior Geoscience Executive Advisor, James C. Johnson as Senior Marketing and Midstream Executive and Traci D. Cook as Chief Accounting Officer…
The third shoe has now dropped. On Monday we told you that Schlumberger has cut an additional 11,000 jobs–20,000 total now gone–from the payroll (see