2 New Nominations to Frack Under (NOT On) Salt Fork State Park, OH
In February, the Ohio Oil & Gas Land Management Commission (OGLMC) met to award contracts to drill under (not on) several Ohio state parks, including 5,700 acres of the 20,000-acre Salt Fork State Park in Guernsey County (see Ohio Awards Drilling Contracts for State Parks – Salt Fork Surprise). The contract for Salt Fork was awarded to Infinity Natural Resources. Then, in June, the OGLMC received a new nomination to drill under another 2,300 acres of Salt Fork State Park (see Mystery Driller Asks Ohio to Lease More of Salt Fork State Park). And now, two more parcels have been nominated for drilling under (not on) the park, totaling an additional 884 acres. Read More “2 New Nominations to Frack Under (NOT On) Salt Fork State Park, OH”
The radicalized Environmental Defense Fund (EDF), in partnership with the equally radicalized Moms Clean Air Force (MCAF), is joining forces with the Pennsylvania Department of Environmental Protection (DEP), the U.S. Department of Energy (DOE), and (very oddly) McGill University, which is located in Montreal, Quebec (Canada) to launch a project to identify and “facilitate remediation of” orphan and abandoned oil and gas wells across Western Pennsylvania. The group will fly specially outfitted drones about 100 feet above ground in Clarion, Venango, and McKean counties in western PA to try and identify and catalog orphaned and abandoned oil and gas wells. 
In yet another attempt to deflect attention away from Kamala Harris’ extreme position on fracking (she wanted to ban it completely everywhere in 2019), mainstream news continues to publish stories on other Pennsylvania energy topics. For example, yesterday, the New York Times published a story with this headline: “Big Energy Issue in Pennsylvania Is Low Natural Gas Prices. Not Fracking.” We forced ourselves to read it all the way through. We “took one for the team,” so you won’t have to. The story started out fine and made some legitimate points. The NYT article is (more or less) right as far as it goes. The problem is that the article doesn’t go far enough. It stops with only half of the story told. Here at MDN, we tell you the whole story—all of the facts, not just some of the facts. 
On Friday, June 14, Equitrans Midstream, the builder and majority owner of the 303-mile Mountain Valley Pipeline (MVP) that runs from Wetzel County, WV, to Pittsylvania County, VA, announced the pipeline had, after a decade of planning and building, finally begun to flow Marcellus/Utica molecules (see 
In September 2019, the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission (FERC) gave its blessing to Eagle LNG to build a small LNG export facility project at a site on the St. Johns River in Jacksonville, Florida (see 
A group of 10 Republican U.S. Senators, led by the great Ted Cruz (from Texas), have introduced a new bill titled “The Safe and Secure Transportation of American Energy Act.” The proposed law expands criminal penalties to cover vandalizing, tampering with, or disrupting the operations or construction of a pipeline. The Senators say current laws criminalize eco-terrorism and the destruction of infrastructure but don’t go far enough and don’t have “enough teeth” when it comes to acts disrupting the operation or construction of a pipeline. Like the situations we saw with protesters constantly delaying the construction of the Mountain Valley Pipeline in Virginia. 
MARCELLUS/UTICA REGION: PA energy groups don’t buy Harris’ ‘deathbed conversion’ on fracking; NATIONAL: Fed judge temporarily blocks Biden admin rule to limit gas flaring at oil wells; Noisy, hungry data centers are catching communities by surprise; Are Harris supporters ignorant or do they just hate Trump more than they love this country?; INTERNATIONAL: Earth’s greatest mass extinction 250 million years ago due to El Niño. 
Hidden in last Friday’s weekly Baker Hughes official rig count is a big story happening in the Marcellus/Utica. From the 30,000-foot level, Friday’s latest rig count report appeared just fine. The national rig count, which counts all oil and gas rigs, added an astonishing eight rigs to the count after languishing for months — the biggest weekly gain in a year. Very nice. The M-U count maintained at 33, down from a few weeks ago, but still not completely terrible. But then you open the hood and look at the engine, and something startling happens. Pennsylvania is losing rigs, bleeding rigs, like crazy—four rigs gone in the last two weeks. And West Virginia is gaining those lost rigs. Typically, there’s no one answer as to why these things happen. Our best guess is that Mountain Valley Pipeline (MVP), coming online from the northern panhandle of WV to southern Virginia, carrying natgas to markets outside the immediate region for higher prices, has much to do with this realignment.
We spotted a report about an aboveground pipeline that flows shale wastewater that sprung a leak and released an estimated 12,600 gallons of brine (salty water from deep below the surface) on the ground in Gilmore Township, Greene County, PA. The pipeline is owned by EQM Gathering, another name for Equitrans Midstream, which is now owned by EQT. The leaking pipeline connects to the Trust Well Site owned by EQT. It sure sounds like a serious spill (12,600 gallons) with the potential to contaminate local water supplies—until you dig into the state Dept. of Environmental Protection’s (DEP) report on the incident. 
A couple of interesting developments with the Susquehanna River Basin Commission (SRBC), which, unlike its dysfunctional cousin, the Delaware River Basin Commission (DRBC), the SRBC continues to allow water withdrawals to supply water for shale fracking in northeastern Pennsylvania. The first development is that over the weekend (on Saturday), the SRBC Hydrologic Conditions Monitor showed low stream flows in some areas that triggered water withdrawal restrictions for water users, including seven shale gas water withdrawal locations (most of them for driller Repsol). The other development is that two days earlier, on Thursday, the SRBC approved new water withdrawal requests for 22 new projects, including eight from shale drillers! 
The Pennsylvania Dept. of Environmental Protection (DEP) wants to spend some of the $214+ million it’s receiving from the federal government’s Phase 1 & 2 program to plug orphaned conventional oil and gas wells on a research project to determine the potential health impacts of living near such wells. You may recall the flawed (totally fake) “research” conducted by the University of Pittsburgh in 2023 that purported to show a connection between shale drilling and childhood cancer clusters (see 
Last week, the U.S. Energy Information Administration (EIA) highlighted efforts to blend hydrogen (H2) with natural gas (CH4) in power-generating plants. By EIA’s reckoning, ten power plants scattered across the country are either experimenting with mixing hydrogen with natgas right now or soon will. We have covered several of these projects here at MDN, including efforts by the Long Ridge Energy Terminal in Monroe County, OH, to blend Utica shale gas with hydrogen (see 
For the week of Sept. 2 – 8, 14 permits were issued to drill new shale wells in Marcellus/Utica, less than half the previous week’s 32. The Keystone State (PA) had 13 new permits. PA’s top recipient was Seneca Resources, with six permits issued in Tioga County. Range Resources was #2 with four permits for Lycoming County. Chesapeake Energy had two permits in Bradford County, and Inflection Energy had a single new permit in Lycoming County.