Mt. Airy City Council voted on Oct. 13 to sue the Delaware River Basin Commission (DRBC) to prevent the Commission from allowing hydraulic fracturing to move forward in Mt. Airy.
Read More “Mt Airy PA City Council Sues DRBC to Prevent Fracking”
An interesting tidbit those of us in the U.S. can only salivate over… There is a shale formation in the U.K. that spreads all the way from North Wales (in the south of England) to near the Scottish border in Cumbria (in the north) and well over into Yorkshire as well. That is, it sits under most of the country. But here’s the unique thing about that shale deposit: A couple of exploratory wells drilled by British Gas found the thickness of the shale layer to be 3,000 feet! That is ginormous. By comparison, the Marcellus Shale layer is an average 300 feet thick. The UK shale layer is 10 times that amount. Meaning it holds perhaps 10 times the amount of shale gas as an equivalent section of the Marcellus.
Range Resources, one of the largest drillers in the Marcellus Shale, reports in its third quarter operations update that the company is on track to produce 400 million cubic feet of shale gas per day from its Marcellus Shale gas wells. During the third quarter, Range drilled 56 new wells in the Marcellus region of PA with a total of 229 producing wells across the state, most of them in the southwest part of the state.
From the Range quarterly operations update:
Read More “Range Completes 56 New PA Marcellus Wells in Q311”
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: Wednesday, Oct 26, 2011”
As mentioned yesterday by MDN, the self-appointed Citizens Marcellus Shale Commission—a group made up of liberal and left-leaning environmental and labor groups including the Sierra Club of PA, Penn Environment, Keystone Progress, Clean Water Action and the League of Women Voters—has released a list of recommendations for regulating shale gas drilling in the state. A copy of the 89-page report is embedded below.
Read More “Citizens Marcellus Shale Commission Issues Recommendations”
MDN has chronicled the attempt by Morgantown, WV to ban drilling up to one mile outside of the city line—a saga that spanned many months. In the end, a judge struck down the ban and two wells were drilled and fracked. The main concern was that fracking might somehow contaminate the city’s water supply, which comes from the nearby Monongahela River (something that did not happen). But another concern was that the fracking process might cause air pollution that would affect a nearby elementary school. It seems that fear was also unfounded:
A second joint venture that CONSOL has announced in recent months has just been completed. Yesterday, CONSOL received an initial $60 million of a total $594 million from Hess to develop 200,000 Utica Shale acres in Ohio. Previously, CONSOL entered another joint venture with Noble Energy for $3.4 billion to develop 663,350 acres in western Pennsylvania and West Virginia (see this MDN story). Why all the joint ventures? Money! CONSOL needs cash to develop its Marcellus and Utica Shale acreage, and in order to get the cash, they have cut (so far) two deals, granting their partners a 50 percent interest in each case.
Read More “CONSOL Completes Joint Venture with Hess for Ohio Utica Shale”
Shale gas drilling in Monongalia County, WV is heating up with two new well permits requested and more on the way:
Last week a PA joint legislative committee issued a report recommended that the state consider leasing land around state universities and state prisons for shale gas drilling:
Read More “PA Report Recommends Gas Drilling Near Colleges & Prisons”
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: Tuesday, Oct 25, 2011”
The Center for Rural Pennsylvania is a bipartisan legislative agency serving as a resource and research arm for rural policy in the Pennsylvania Assembly and Senate. The Center has just released the results of a study conducted in 2010 and 2011 analyzing the impacts of Marcellus Shale gas drilling on rural drinking water supplies. This was an unbiased, large scale study of water quality in 233 private water wells in rural Pennsylvania before and after the drilling of nearby Marcellus Shale gas wells. The study results are embedded below.
The study found that dissolved methane exists in about 20 percent of private water wells—before drilling begins. In the executive summary, the study concludes:
Read More “New PA Study: No Link Between Fracking & Water Contamination”
Norse Energy’s big gamble that New York would allow shale gas drilling sooner than now has not paid off and they are throwing in the towel, attempting to find a buyer for their 130,000-acre leasehold in the state.
Carroll County, Ohio is in the midst of a shale gas whirlwind. Signing bonus offers are being made to landowners in the $3,000-$5,000 range. But that’s not all. For landowners who previously signed, several years ago, some companies are offering to purchase royalty rights from landowners, even for wells that are not drilled and may never be drilled. Here’s the story from one such landowner:
Read More “Companies Offer to Buy Royalty Rights from Ohio Landowners”
In August of this year, a number of anti-drilling groups in Pennsylvania banded together to form the Citizens Marcellus Shale Commission—to counterbalance Gov. Tom Corbett’s Marcellus Shale Advisory Commission. Among the groups sponsoring the new commission are the Sierra Club, Penn Environment, Keystone Progress, Clean Water Action and Delaware Riverkeeper. The new Citizens Commission held five public hearings in September and has collected testimony from hundreds of Pennsylvanians and is due to release a final report today outlining “responsible drilling” measures it recommends should be adopted in PA.
Apparently the final report is not to the liking of the Delaware Riverkeeper (ie, it’s not anti-drilling enough), and so they have resigned from the commission in a snit. Delaware Riverkeeper is perhaps the most extreme of the anti-drilling groups, calling for a ban on all drilling in the state. Here’s the Delaware Riverkeeper press release announcing their departure:
Read More “Delaware Riverkeeper Quits Citizens Marcellus Shale Commission”
A columnist in the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette asks the question, “Should young people consider putting off college in order to work a job in the Marcellus Shale?” And the surprising answer is, “Maybe.” She recounts her random run-in with a young man in the Pittsburgh airport who was flying home to visit his parents, as he does regularly. His job? Laying pipeline in the Marcellus Shale. Her point was that in a time of economic uncertainty like we are in, putting off college for a while and working in the shale gas industry may be the right choice for some young people.
Read More “Some Young People Bypass College for a Marcellus Shale Job”
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: Monday, Oct 24, 2011”