Et tu Rochester? Rochester, NY is the latest New York municipality to ban hydraulic fracturing. Their ban is for one year.
Seems Cuomo’s trial balloon to allow fracking (nowhere near Rochester) and the soon-to-be-released new drilling rules from the state DEC have scared some uninformed politicians, like those in Rochester, into acting rashly.
The Tuscarawas Oil and Gas Alliance (TOGA) Summit was held on Tuesday, June 19 at the Performing Arts Center at Kent State Tuscarawas, Ohio. One of the speakers was Rhonda Reda, executive director of the Ohio Oil and Gas Energy Education Program (OOGEEP). She said in 2011 there were 33 shale wells drilled with 5 in production, and by 2015 eastern Ohio will see some 4,000 new shale wells, mostly in the Utica Shale.
Reda had a number of statistics and predictions for how large the drilling boom will get in Ohio. Among the statistics she highlighted:
Read More “Just How Big Will Shale Oil/Gas Drilling Get in Ohio?”
Time for a brief distraction from the troubles Chesapeake has had of late—so let’s focus on a new “problem.” That would be the public relations kerfuffle Rice Energy and its founder Dan Rice are facing in the press.
Dan has been the single most successful mutual fund manager in the United States over the past 10 years. He is co-manager of five energy-related funds for BlackRock. But not any more.
Read More “BlackRock’s Screw-up with Dan Rice & Rice Energy”
MDN received the following announcement about a combined landowner coalition meeting happening tomorrow night (Thursday night) in Otego, NY. Two coalitions will meet together: The Central New York Landowner Coalition and the Unatego Land Coalition. MDN knows from previous meetings that we’ve attended that the CNY coalition is quite large, perhaps the single largest New York coalition with thousands of active members. The meeting will feature a screening of the new Truthland movie along with a presentation by former NY DEC Commissioner Mike Zagata.
Combined Coalition Meeting (With the Unatego Land Coalition)
June 21, 2012 – 7PM – Unatego Jr/Sr High School – Otego, NY
Full Length "Truthland" Movie starts at 6:40PM
Read More “Large Combined Upstate NY Landowner Meeting June 21”
Ohio’s attorney general, Mike DeWine, has Chesapeake Energy in his crosshairs. He’s investigating them for “fraud” because their stock price went down. Good luck with that.
Here’s what the Columbus Dispatch is reporting:
The “best of the rest” – stories that caught MDN’s eye that you may be interested in reading:
Read More “Marcellus & Utica Shale Story Links: Wed, Jun 20, 2012”
I love it. One of the biggest environmentalist gurus of the past 40 years has been British scientist (formerly with NASA) James Lovelock. It seems Dr. Lovelock has had a change of heart. He’s in favor of fracking and says Britain should be “going mad on it.” He also says the modern green movement has turned into a religion and its theories are “meaningless drivel.”
From a story in the UK Daily Mail:
Read More “Iconic Environmentalist James Lovelock Loves Fracking”
Today, Devon Energy Corp.’s environmental manager Darren Smith will testify before the Senate Environment and Public Works Committee in Washington, D.C. about the Environmental Protection Agency’s badly overestimated data on the amount of so-called fugitive emissions that escape from a natural gas well when it’s drilled (a copy of his full testimony is embedded below).
Read More “EPA Air Pollution Rules Targeted at Senate Hearing Today”
An attorney writing on the JD Supra legal website says it’s not just the imagination of oil and gas drillers in the Marcellus Shale region—the federal Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) really is out to get them. He proceeds to use statistics to show the rapid escalation in citations coming from the EPA since 2010.
Read More “EPA’s Aggressive Actions Against Marcellus Drillers”
Three activist investor groups, all of them anti-drilling, are trying to use the influence of that money to shut down oil and gas drilling. If you have money invested with the members of any of these groups, you should consider removing your money and investing it elsewhere.
The groups are: The North American Investor Network on Climate Risk, the European Institutional Investors Group on Climate Change, and the Australia/New Zealand Investor Group on Climate Change. Collectively they represent over 200 members with total assets under management of $20 trillion.
Their target for now? The discredited concept that oil and gas drilling which uses hydraulic fracturing (just about all oil and gas drilling) leads to an increase in methane in the atmosphere—so called “fugitive emissions.”
Read More “Wall Street Big Money Targets Companies that Frack”
Penn Virginia Resource Partners (PVR), a midstream company, yesterday announced it’s selling off a small natural gas gathering system and processing plant in east Texas to DCP Midstream Partners for $63 million. The reason? To concentrate more on the Marcellus Shale region (and to focus more on PVR’s other area of focus—the panhandle of Texas and Oklahoma).
From the PVR press release:
Read More “PVR Sells Pipeline in East Texas, Concentrating on Marcellus”
Inergy Midstream, UGI Energy and Capitol Energy Ventures are partnering to build a new 200-mile natural gas pipeline from Lycoming County, PA all the way to Rockville, MD (see this MDN story). Called the Commonwealth Pipeline, the new $1 billion pipeline will connect with several major interstate pipelines along its route.
Yesterday, Inergy et al reported that their non-binding open season to sign up customers to use the pipeline went better than expected. From the Inergy press release:
Read More “Commonwealth Pipeline Open Season Exceeds Expectations”
The “best of the rest” – stories that caught MDN’s eye that you may be interested in reading:
Read More “Marcellus & Utica Shale Story Links: Tue, Jun 19, 2012”
Whoa, wait a minute. The editorial board of the very liberal Albany Times Union is (gasp) in favor of limited fracking in New York State as a test. Really? Really.
But of course, they condition it all on prior assurances of safety from DEC and EPA, and they want all sorts of ands, ifs and buts inserted to conduct such a test.
Here’s what they said in a recent editorial (and below, why this is politically significant):
Read More “Albany Times Union Announces Support for Fracking”
Does hydraulic fracturing—the process of forcing water, sand and a few chemicals down the bore hole and into shale formations—cause earthquakes? The National Research Council (NRC), part of the National Academies of Science, says the answer to that would be “no, fracking does not cause earthquakes.” That’s according to a new study just released by the NRC titled “Induced Seismicity Potential in Energy Technologies” (a link to the full study is embedded below).
The study found that out of a sample size of 35,000 oil and gas wells that have been horizontally fracked, earthquakes have been detected—get ready—in one instance. One. Which is statistically dead zero.
As the number of Marcellus gas wells increase in Pennsylvania, so too do the number of pipelines to move the gas and the number of natural gas compressor stations. Compressor stations push the gas along the pipeline until the pipeline connects to a larger pipeline. Compressor stations are the next battleground for anti-drillers who want to plant the seeds of doubt.
For example, 29 permits have been or are being considered for compressor stations in northeastern PA, and of those, nearly two dozen of them are within a 15-mile radius of Dimock, PA. Since 2005, 383 permits have been issued statewide, but not all of them have been or will be built. The issue of contention is air pollution. Each station emits some volatile organic compounds (VOCs) and nitrogen oxides (NOx). How much they emit, and their combined effect in a region, is what is in dispute.
Read More “The Next Battleground for Shale Drilling: Compressor Plants”