17 New Shale Well Permits Issued for OH-WV (Not PA) Jul 10-16
We’re trying not to sound too PO’d (personally offended) here, but once again, in what seems to be an every month or two occurrence, the Pennsylvania Dept. of Environmental Protection’s (DEP) online oil and gas permitting database is throwing an error. So, we are left with no permit numbers for PA for the week of July 10-16. Neither the Ohio Dept. of Natural Resources (ODNR) reporting system nor the West Virginia DEP reporting system have these problems. It is only the PA DEP that routinely goes “off the air.” Why is that? [Rant over] Even without PA’s numbers, OH and WV combined issued 17 permits last week, versus the pathetic 11 total from the prior week that included PA.
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MARCELLUS/UTICA REGION: Biden’s tough sell in PA – green energy to union workers; NATIONAL: U.S. leading indicators point to recession starting soon; KM predicts 20 Bcf/d of U.S. natgas demand growth by 2028; Catalyst can control methane emissions in natural gas engines; And now, the climate gang is coming for our thermostats; INTERNATIONAL: China, having bought out Biden, is playing climate with us; Europe set to reach natural gas storage target ahead of schedule.
We love a good “back from the dead” story. In 2017 Epiphany Water Solutions (aka Epiphany Environmental, LLC) filed for a permit to build a centralized oil and gas wastewater treatment facility in Coudersport (Potter County), PA (see 
Cheniere Energy CEO Jack Fusco dropped a verbal bomb at the LNG 2023 conference held last week in Vancouver, British Columbia (Canada). Fusco told journalists that his company “will likely build a pipeline” that connects to other pipelines to flow even more natural gas to its Sabine Pass LNG export facility that sits near Sabine Lake, close to the Gulf Coast. The motivation is to get more gas for a planned “stage 5” expansion of the Sabine Pass facility, designed to liquefy and export an additional 20 million tonnes per annum (MTPA) of LNG.
In January, Ohio House Bill (HB) 507 became law with the signature of Gov. Mike DeWine (see 
Researchers with the University of Pittsburgh (Pitt) recently published a study in the journal Ecological Indicators. The study’s intent was to measure whether or not frack waste dumped in local landfills has radiation that is leaking out in groundwater (leachate) from those facilities. Research like this, if legitimate (and accurate), is a good thing. We need to know if the waste we’re dumping is causing a problem. But a funny thing happened during the study. The researchers found a big problem with recordkeeping.
Two of the world’s largest three oilfield services (OFS) companies, Halliburton and Baker Hughes, provided updates this week for their second-quarter performance and operations. Both companies said essentially the same thing. Drilling is slowing down in U.S. shale, but offshore drilling in other parts of the world is still going strong and makes up for the slowdown here at home.
This story reinforces what we have said FOR YEARS: The radicalized environmental left will NEVER be satisfied that fossil energy is acceptable, no matter what we do to ensure it’s “clean and green.” As we have said so many times before, the environmental left is unreasonable–not able to be reasoned with. Irrational. Haters. We have new evidence for our claims. There are four major certification schemes to ensure natural gas produced in the U.S. is “responsible”–or clean and green. In March, the Bidenistas began to sniff around the certification authorities to grab that authority for themselves. A cabal of some 150 “environmental” (leftist Communist) groups are telling the Bidenistas not to bother. Gas will never be acceptable.
In a process that began in December 2021, Olympus Energy (formerly Huntley & Huntley) announced it had contracted with Project Canary to monitor methane emissions from both the company’s drilling operations and the company’s pipeline operations (see 
In April 2022, MDN told you about Nopetro LNG’s plans to construct and operate as many as three liquefaction trains in Port St. Joe, Florida, that will liquefy up to 3.86 billion cubic feet (Bcf) per year of natural gas for export and delivery to markets in the Caribbean, Central America, and South America (see 
Yesterday, U.S. Senator Joe Manchin (D-WV), Chairman of the U.S. Senate Energy and Natural Resources Committee, filed an amicus curiae (friend of the court) brief with the U.S. Supreme Court in support of Mountain Valley Pipeline’s (MVP) emergency application to vacate the stays of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fourth Circuit (4th Circuit) that are blocking completion of MVP. The Fiscal Responsibility Act (FRA) of 2023, signed into law on June 3 by President Biden, specifically removes legal jurisdiction for MVP from all courts but the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia (D.C. Circuit). Yet the 4th Circuit recently blocked two key permits, by extension blocking all construction of MVP. Last Friday MVP filed an emergency appeal with the Supreme Court (see 
U.S. Senator Joe Manchin is a typical politician. That is, he lies. His latest whopper concerns a measure he advanced to “prohibit” the Biden administration from “banning gas stoves,” which he touted in a recent video. However, just two years ago, Manchin opposed an amendment from Wyoming Republican senator John Barrasso that prohibited federal funds from being used to ban natural gas in new construction, saying the measure wasn’t necessary and that such bans would never happen. Joe-then and Joe-now appear to be two different people. Funny how Joe gets more “conservative” the closer he gets to an election year.
PJM is the largest electric grid operator in the U.S. It serves 65 million people in 13 states plus the District of Columbia (including PA, OH, and WV). PJM came under withering criticism for an almost blackout during the Christmas cold snap last Dec. 23-25. If not for certain gas-fired peaker plants, like that in the Little Town of Bethlehem, the lights would have gone out during a brutal cold snap (see 
As we point out in another story today about Olympus Energy selling its “responsible gas” via a deal with Tenaska, what the left means by ESG (Environment, Social, Governance) and what the shale industry means by ESG, are two different things. When companies like BlackRock talk about forcing the companies they invest in to toe the line with respect to ESG, it means forcing those companies to divest from fossil energy. Republicans in the U.S. House of Representatives are pushing back hard against investor ESG nonsense because it threatens the retirement funds of this country’s massive middle class.
Yesterday, Japan’s JERA Co. Inc. and Korea Gas Corp. (KOGAS) announced a new initiative called the Coalition for LNG Emission Abatement toward Net-zero (“CLEAN”). The private-public initiative has the support of the governments of Japan, South Korea, Australia, the U.S., and Europe, whose representatives signed a framework agreement for creating a mechanism to monitor methane emissions. “To support the Coalition, Japan and the European Commission expressed their vision to create a globally aligned methane emission assessment of LNG projects and to incentivize methane mitigation by LNG producers by facilitating the information collection process of methane leakage counter measures and methane reduction targets,” a joint statement by the allies said.