Maryland Republican Senator Votes to Delay Fracking (Say What?)
Another “with friends like these, who needs enemies” stories when it comes to fracking in Maryland. It had seemed as though fracking in the Old Line state might take off–perhaps not soon, but at least at some point in the next year or two (see Maryland Gets Ready to Frack! Gov O’Malley Files New Regulations). We should have known former Maryland Gov. Martin O’Malley, a lefty Democrat, only issued new fracking regs on his way out of office because he wants to run for president (he never wanted fracking). Still, we take our victories any way we can get them. But then the House and Senate started larding up the issue by passing all sorts of bills that would throttle or even prevent fracking. Last week the Maryland House passed a moratorium for three years, and on Monday of this week, the Maryland Senate passed a mortatorium for two years. The curious thing is that Maryland Republican State Senator George Edwards, whose district in Western Maryland is about the only district that would conceivably see fracking, voted FOR the two year moratorium! He supposedly supports fracking. Wait…did we miss something? Did logic and common sense just go out the window? More politics as usual?…
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In early February, MDN told you that EV Energy Partners, a company with a huge amount of leased acreage in the Ohio Utica Shale region, was looking to sell its 21% interest in Utica East Ohio (UEO)–a midstream/pipeline company operating in Ohio (see 
Who were the top 5 natural gas producers in Pennsylvania for all of 2014? The names of the companies won’t surprise you if you’ve read MDN for any length of time. But the order of the list may surprise you, and the number of active wells for some of them likely will surprise you…
Last week our favorite government agency, the U.S. Energy Information Administration, published an update to their U.S. Crude Oil and Natural Gas Proved Reserves research. The update/report, titled “Top 100 U.S. Oil and Gas Fields” (full copy below) shows the 100 largest U.S. oil and gas fields by their estimated 2013 proved reserves. That’s the top 100 oil fields, and a second list for the top 100 gas fields–based on 2013 estimates for reserves. It probably won’t surprise you to learn the #1 gas field in the U.S. is the Marcellus. It may (or may not) surprise you to learn the #1 oil field in the U.S. in 2013 was the Eagle Ford (again, based on reserves). It likely will surprise you, as it did us, to not find the Utica/Point Pleasant anywhere in either list! But then we remembered that the Utica was just getting under way in 2013. Still, not even in the top 100? Seems a bit off to us…
Three weeks ago anti-drillers in the Cleveland suburb of Broadview Heights were handed a crushing defeat in which a County Common Pleas Court judge struck down a so-called community “bill of rights”–the only “right” of which was to deny legitimate oil and gas drillers the ability to conduct business. We pointed out what sore losers anti-drillers are (see 
Belmont County landowner Curtis Wallner doesn’t know what the term “nuisance oil” means in the contract XTO Energy is offering him to lease his 26 acres. The contract says Wallner will receive an eye-popping $8,000 per acre in signing bonus money, plus 20% royalties, MINUS revenue for “non-commercial nuisance oil.” Because XTO can’t or won’t explain it or remove it from the contract, Wallner won’t sign (can’t say that we blame him). So XTO is threatening him that they’ll take his gas anyway via forced pooling…