PA Town Rejects Accepting Apex Offer of $1,500/Ac + 16% Royalty
In June, MDN told you about a very small lease deal on offer for North Huntingdon Township in Westmoreland County, PA (see Apex Energy Offers $1,500/Ac + 16% Royalty in Westmoreland Co.). Apex Energy wants to lease 4.5 acres of town land for a total signing bonus of $6,760 ($1,500/acre). The deal on the table from Apex was “only good” through June 30. Sign now before this offer expires! Town commissioners were not impressed with the high-pressure sales tactic and voted to table a decision on the offer until after June 30 (see PA Town Delays Accepting Apex Offer of $1,500/Ac + 16% Royalty). After hearing from constituents and discussing the offer, last week the commissioners voted 5-2 to reject the Apex offer.
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In the fall of 2021, President Biden signed into law the so-called Infrastructure Bill, some $1.2 trillion in pork barrel spending, passed with the help of turncoat Republicans (see 
In May, the supervisors of West Deer Township (Allegheny County), PA, held a regular monthly meeting. One item on the agenda was the potential adoption of revisions to the town’s oil and gas drilling ordinance. A number of (supposed) residents showed up to question the revisions and ask for stricter setbacks (a bigger distance from drilling to homes and other structures). Ultimately, the supervisors decided to delay a vote on the revisions, pushing it off until a future meeting (see 
Last November, Tellurian, a company founded by Charif Souki, filed a report with the Securities and Exchange Commission warning investors that its financial situation raised “substantial doubt” that the company could continue as a going concern (see 
Freeport LNG, by all accounts, continues to be offline. It was supposed to restart one of its three “trains” (liquefaction units) last week (see 
The U.S. national oil and gas rig regained some lost ground last week by adding two rigs. The national combined Baker Hughes oil and gas rig count now stands at 586 active rigs. After staying static for six weeks, the Marcellus/Utica added a rig last week. Pennsylvania continued to operate 21 rigs. Ohio added a rig and now operates 11 active rigs. West Virginia remained the same with five active rigs. The M-U’s primary competitor, the Haynesville, lost one rig and now operates 36 rigs.
OTHER U.S. REGIONS: Youngkin speaks about energy plan ahead of update; NATIONAL: FTC probes oil executives’ texts for OPEC collusion; Kamala Harris seen as tougher oil industry than Biden; U.S. will fall behind in the AI race without natural gas; INTERNATIONAL: SLB and Halliburton see strong international oilfield demand; How U.S. pension funds help Putin’s gas gambit.
For the week of July 8 – 14, a total of 31 permits were issued to drill new shale wells in Marcellus/Utica. Pennsylvania had a nice increase with 25 new permits issued. A full 9 of PA’s permits went to Snyder Brothers for a single well in Armstrong County. Another 6 permits went to EQT in PA’s Greene and Washington counties. There were 5 new permits in Ohio, all of them going to Encino Energy for a single pad in Guernsey County. West Virginia had a single new permit going to EQT in Wetzel County.
In early June, the owner of Austin Master Services (AMS), American Environmental Partners (AEP), sent a press announcement to MDN to announce he had found a buyer for AMS (see 
Environmental radicals have struck out a second time, and they’re pretty bitter about it. We’re talking about Senate Bill (SB) 831, the Carbon Capture & Sequestration (CCS) Act. Last week, a strong bipartisan majority in the PA legislature ignored the radicals that had asked Democrat legislators to block the bill, passing the bill and sending it to the governor’s desk (see 
The Passaic Valley Sewerage Commission operates the largest sewage treatment plant in the entire state of New Jersey — in Newark. When Hurricane Sandy hit in 2012, the sewer plant lost power and dumped BILLIONS of gallons of raw sewage into the Passaic River. The Commission has a plan to prevent that from happening again: Build a tiny natural gas peaker plant to generate electricity. It would only be used to prevent such environmental damage again (i.e., rarely used, only for emergencies). Yet Earthjustice and other radicalized leftists accuse the plan to build the peaker plant of being racist, and they oppose it (see 
Dominion Energy plans to build four small “peaker” electric generating plants in Chesterfield County, VA, near Richmond (see 
The Bureau of Land Management (BLM) is seeking public input on four draft environmental assessments evaluating potential impacts from the proposed plugging of orphaned oil and gas wells on public lands in Pennsylvania and West Virginia. One of the assessments seeks public input on plans to cap twenty abandoned gas and oil wells along the river flowing into the Shenango River Lake in Mercer County.
It pains us to write these kinds of posts, but we can’t ignore the bad news that the futures price for natural gas (NYMEX Henry Hub, front-month) is once again crashing. It closed down just above $2.00 yesterday. Will the price actually sink below $2 once again? It’s possible. The question is, why? What is driving this latest round of low prices even as the weather has been hot, hot, hot? We almost saw prices above $3 not long ago, and yet here we are, bumping along near $2 once again. The NYMEX price has closed down (lower than the previous day) in 19 of the last 24 trading sessions.