Marcellus & Utica Shale Story Links: Wed, Jun 20, 2012
The “best of the rest” – stories that caught MDN’s eye that you may be interested in reading:
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Iconic Environmentalist James Lovelock Loves Fracking
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:
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EPA Air Pollution Rules Targeted at Senate Hearing Today
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).
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EPA’s Aggressive Actions Against Marcellus Drillers
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.
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Wall Street Big Money Targets Companies that Frack
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.”
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PVR Sells Pipeline in East Texas, Concentrating on Marcellus
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:
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Energy Services | Industrywide Issues | Inergy | Pennsylvania | Pipelines | Statewide PA | UGI Energy Services
Commonwealth Pipeline Open Season Exceeds Expectations
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:
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Marcellus & Utica Shale Story Links: Tue, Jun 19, 2012
The “best of the rest” – stories that caught MDN’s eye that you may be interested in reading:
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Albany Times Union Announces Support for Fracking
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):
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NRC Study: Fracking Does Not Cause Earthquakes
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.
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Energy Services | Industrywide Issues | Pennsylvania | Pipelines | Processing Plants | Statewide PA | Susquehanna County | Williams
The Next Battleground for Shale Drilling: Compressor Plants
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.
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Enfield, NY Town Board Bans Fracking for it’s Landowners
Another New York town votes to ban fracking for one year. Not that it makes a hill of beans worth of difference. The town board for Enfield, in Tompkins County, New York, voted last Wednesday to ban fracking:
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Shale Drilling’s Positive Effect on OH Commercial Real Estate
The numbers in Ohio show that the Utica and Marcellus Shale drilling boom is already having a positive affect on the commercial real estate market. Late payments for commercial mortgages and loan delinquency rates have dropped, significantly, in just the past year.
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Marcellus & Utica Shale Story Links: Mon, Jun 18, 2012
The “best of the rest” – stories that caught MDN’s eye that you may be interested in reading:
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Chesapeake Energy | Energy Companies | Industrywide Issues | Lease & Royalty Payments | Litigation | New York | Statewide NY
Victory for NY Landowners in Chesapeake Force Majeure Case
In a major victory for New York landowners, Attorney General Eric Schniederman’s office reached a settlement with Chesapeake Energy to allow 4,400+ landowners with a collective 264,000 acres to renegotiate old gas drilling leases that Chesapeake was attempting to extend using the “force majeure” clause. MDN has followed this story for more than a year (see this MDN story from May 2011 for history and background).As a brief background, a number of New York landowners—many of them in the Southern Tier area of New York—signed gas drilling leases in 2000 with small drilling companies. The leases had a 10-year term. Most of the landowners got $3 per acre as a signing bonus. Those leases, along with leases signed prior to 2000, were bought by Chesapeake in the mid-2000s. In 2009, Chesapeake sent letters to New York landowners invoking the force majeure clause, which is legalese for “we’re extending the contract term due to extenuating circumstances, which we believe is our right to do.” The extenuating circumstance? The moratorium on high volume hydraulic fracturing that was implemented by then-Gov. David Paterson in 2008.
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Dueling Rallies in Albany Over Cuomo’s Fracking Plan
Both anti- and pro-drillers staged rallies in Albany, NY yesterday in response to the leaked plan by the Cuomo administration to allow limited hydraulic fracturing of gas wells in five Southern Tier counties.
Perhaps two dozen anti-drilling protestors showed up outside of Gov. Cuomo’s office for their PR appearance before the cameras. An hour later, they went to stand outside of a much a larger crowd of pro-drillers who staged a press conference featuring five town supervisors who were there to say they want drilling in their townships.
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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.
In a major victory for New York landowners, Attorney General Eric Schniederman’s office reached a settlement with Chesapeake Energy to allow 4,400+ landowners with a collective 264,000 acres to renegotiate old gas drilling leases that Chesapeake was attempting to extend using the “force majeure” clause. MDN has followed this story for more than a year (see