Europeans Presume to Impose Their Regulations on American Gas
This one gets under our skin. The European Union’s idiotic methane regulations will soon come into full force, prompting oil, gas, and coal companies to monitor, measure and report their emissions. The same restrictions will also apply to energy imports. That impacts the United States, the EU’s largest liquefied natural gas supplier. In other words, the arrogant Europeans presume to tell us that we must follow *their* regulations! To which we say (multiple expletives deleted)…
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MDN is taking a few days off for the Independence Day (July 4th) holiday to rest, relax, and recharge. We will not post any new stories from Wednesday, July 3, through Friday, July 5. We will be back on July 8 to catch you up on all the news related to the Marcellus and Utica shale region, including permits issued for the week of June 24-30. Have a great Fourth!
OTHER U.S. REGIONS: 423K voter signatures collected for natural gas access initiative; NATIONAL: U.S. natural gas slides to six-week low as weather forecasts shift cooler; Trump’s enviro agenda – embrace Big Oil, ignore climate crazies; INTERNATIONAL: Hurricane and geopolitical risks push oil prices to 2-month high; Overall OPEC production steady while some members exceed limits.
We didn’t bring you the latest permit numbers on Friday because the Pennsylvania Dept. of Environmental Protection’s report website was down (again, for the umpteenth time). The site was back online this morning, so we ran our weekly query and discovered PA issued a whopping three permits for the week of June 17-23, all of them issued to Coterra Energy in (gasp) the township of Dimock! Yes, drilling in Dimock is back. Love it! In addition, Ohio issued nine new permits, with seven going to Encino Energy for oil drilling in Guernsey and Harrison counties. Ohio also issued two permits to Ascent Resources in Jefferson County. West Virginia issued no new shale permits for that period.
Three weeks ago, the owner of Austin Master Services (AMS), American Environmental Partners (AEP), sent a press announcement to MDN to announce he has found a buyer for AMS (see 
The highly functional and responsible Susquehanna River Basin Commission (SRBC), unlike its completely dysfunctional and irresponsible cousin, the Delaware River Basin Commission (DRBC), continues to support the shale energy industry by approving water withdrawals for responsible and safe shale drilling. On June 13, the SRBC board approved 19 new water withdrawal requests within the basin, seven of them for water used in drilling and fracking shale wells in Pennsylvania. The Marcellus/Utica shale drillers (and one water company) receiving a green light from SRBC included BKV (3 requests), EQT, Keystone Clearwater Solutions, Seneca Resources, and Southwestern Energy.
Leftists (aka liberals, Communists, socialists, and leaders of the Democrat Party) believe they are smarter than you, they know more than you do, and they should be able to make decisions that affect your life outside of the laws created by duly elected members of Congress. For decades (some 40 years), we in the U.S. have lived under the tyranny of the bureaucratic administrative state following a court decision commonly referred to as the “Chevron deference” case. That case, decided in 1984 (ironic, no?), gave broad powers to federal agencies like the EPA and other executive branch agencies to create, in essence, their own laws (called regulations) without any specific delegation of authority by Congress to do so. It has led to the radical loss of freedom as bureaucratic leftists seized power to enact rules they demand YOU live under. No more! Last Friday, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled in a case that nullified and threw out the Chevron deference doctrine. This has HUGE implications for the entire oil and gas industry, including the Marcellus/Utica.
Must be it’s an election year. How do we know? The desperate Democrats are doing their best to distract and focus attention away from the decrepit, mentally impaired Joe Biden by accusing “Big Oil” of conspiring with OPEC to keep oil prices high. Except oil prices aren’t all that high. U.S. Senator Sheldon Whitehouse, a Communist (who pretends to be a Democrat) from Rhode Island, is “demanding” all sorts of internal communications from “Big Oil” companies in a new witch hunt he’s launched into this earth-shattering matter. Sheldon Whitehouse is a LOSER in all capitals.
The U.S. national oil and gas rig count has been in a pattern of free-falling for the past month. Last week, the national combined Baker Hughes oil and gas rig count dropped by another seven to 581, the lowest since December 2021. It’s gone from free-falling to a bloodbath. The Marcellus/Utica stayed the same last week, for the fourth week in a row, with a combined 36 active rigs. Pennsylvania continued to operate 21 rigs. Ohio remained steady with ten active rigs. And West Virginia kept five active rigs.
Pennsylvania’s Democrat Party is hellbent on driving the Marcellus Shale industry out of the state. They have been for years. That’s just a truthful observation and beyond dispute. One year ago, the Dems in the PA House passed a resolution by a single vote that directs the Legislative Budget and Finance Committee (LBFC) to “study” Pennsylvania’s revenue from the oil and gas industry, comparing it with the top five states for natural gas production in the U.S. (see 
In March, MDN told you that the Pennsylvania Dept. of Environmental Protection (DEP) told Shell to file for a Title V air permit for its ethane cracker in Monaca no later than June 21 of this year or risk being shut down (see 
A little over a year ago, MDN told you that (at that time) that two Marcellus/Utica drillers — Seneca Resources and Northeast Natural Energy (NNE) — had joined CG Hub, the world’s first commodities trading platform focused exclusively on certified natural gas and certified natural gas certificates (see 
BKV Corporation (BKV), a driller in both the Pennsylvania Marcellus and Texas Barnett shale plays (majority-owned by Banpu, Thailand’s largest coal company), announced yesterday that it has signed a contract for the sale and purchase of Carbon Sequestered Gas (CSG) with Kiewit Corporation, one of North America’s largest construction and engineering companies. According to the press release, CSG is “a revolutionary, innovative, natural gas product that is Scope 1, 2 and 3 carbon-neutral, effectively mitigating the environmental impact of natural gas consumption.” Most, if not all, of the gas being labeled and sold by BKV as CSG comes from the company’s Barnett operation. However, BKV’s story has implications for all drillers, including drillers in the Marcellus/Utica.
On Wednesday, the International Gas Union (IGU) released its 15th annual 2024 World LNG Report, the world’s most comprehensive public source of information on key developments and trends in the LNG sector (full copy below). According to the report, the global liquefied natural gas (LNG) market has a newfound but fragile equilibrium. The global LNG trade reached a record level of 401.42 million metric tons in 2023, growing by 2.1% or 8.4 million tons from the previous year. However, the pace of growth decreased last year over the previous year. Why? Not enough LNG supply to meet worldwide demand.