Moody’s & Fitch to Remain Woke, Refuse to Dump ESG Scores like S&P
Last week S&P Global Ratings, the largest and most important of the Big Three credit-rating agencies, which include Moody’s Investors Service and Fitch Ratings, announced it is ditching its system of numerically ranking corporate borrowers on their ESG risk (see S&P Global De-Wokeifies – Dumps ESG Scores from Credit Ratings). Even though S&P will no longer issue a 1 to 5 grade for ESG, the other two (smaller and less important) rating services, Moody’s and Fitch, have reiterated their love of ESG and love of shaming companies into becoming woke like them.
Read More “Moody’s & Fitch to Remain Woke, Refuse to Dump ESG Scores like S&P”
New shale permits issued for Aug 7 – 13 in the Marcellus/Utica crashed for a second week in a row. There were 10 new permits issued last week, down 14 issued the previous week (half of the 29 issued three weeks ago). Last week’s permit tally included 10 new permits in Pennsylvania, no new permits in Ohio, and no new permits in West Virginia (third week in a row for WV). The top permittee for the week was Chesapeake Energy, receiving 6 permits–4 in Bradford County and 2 in Susquehanna County.
MARCELLUS/UTICA REGION: Environmentalists call Dominion’s carbon offsets “greenwashing”; OTHER U.S. REGIONS: Cruz tells Texas oil and natural gas industry to ‘fight back’; NATIONAL: Trump Energy Sec tapped to lead utility lobbying group; Coalition demands DOE Sec. Granholm’s resignation over ethics lapses; Why America’s shale boom is not over; IRA subsidies might create energy minerals supply shortages; INTERNATIONAL: Workers begin strike vote at Chevron’s LNG facilities in Australia.
In 2018, Pennsylvania’s then-Attorney General, Josh Shapiro, assembled a grand jury to “investigate” Marcellus drillers. He lied to them for over two years and eventually got them to indict a number of Marcellus companies on trumped-up charges. The so-called grand jury issued a report (which was actually authored by Shapiro and his minions) in June 2020 (see 
Last September, EQT Corporation announced it was buying privately-owned Tug Hill Operating’s West Virginia shale assets for $5.2 billion (see 
The ARCH2 (Appalachian Regional Clean Hydrogen Hub) project, the West Virginia-led effort to attract government funding for one of 6-10 regional hydrogen hubs, has just landed its second major commitment–even though ARCH2 hasn’t officially been selected for government funding. Yesterday Fidelis New Energy announced it has selected Mason County, WV, for a $2 billion “net-zero” hydrogen production facility and low carbon microgrid, which it has dubbed The Mountaineer GigaSystem. The Fidelis plan includes building data centers powered by net-zero hydrogen. Mountaineer will use FidelisH2 technology that produces hydrogen with zero lifecycle carbon emissions from a combination of Marcellus/Utica gas, renewable energy, and CCUS (carbon capture, utilization, and sequestration).
Last Saturday, a house exploded in Plum, PA, causing two neighboring houses to burn to the ground. Plum is located in Allegheny County near Pittsburgh. Five people died in the blast and fires. However, a sixth person died yesterday from his injuries. We grieve with the families and friends of those who died or were injured. The incident is under investigation. Initial reports said the house that exploded had been “having hot water tank issues” (the hot water tank used natural gas). However, the house is part of a development built on abandoned mine land surrounded by shallow oil and gas wells, some of which have been abandoned. Two wells still producing gas are about 1000 feet from the home. So to be thorough, the state Dept. of Environmental Protection (DEP) has launched its own investigation to see if nearby wells (active or inactive) or the pipelines that connect them could have contributed to the tragedy.
Three weeks ago, MDN told you about the small community of Douglas, Massachusetts, that had outsmarted Big Green by getting Eversource to build a one-mile pipeline extension into Douglas to feed a mammoth new warehouse project (see 
A group of 28 House Democrats asked the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission (FERC) to deny a request from the developers of the Mountain Valley Pipeline (MVP) to extend the project 75 miles into North Carolina, called MVP Southgate, arguing in a letter this week that Southgate’s construction would pose serious climate and environmental risks to affected states. Typical. Why do so many Democrats irrationally hate fossil energy?
We now have the perfect example of how the government corrupts science. In 2020, Pennsylvania’s then-Gov. Tom Wolf gave $2.5 million (via his Dept. of Health) to the University of Pittsburgh (Pitt) with instructions to research whether or not a single cause, shale drilling, is linked to a small cluster of rare childhood cancers in southwestern PA (see 
In April, the U.S. Supreme Court breathed new life into a long-running lawsuit funded by Big Green groups using (abusing) a small group of uppity Virginia landowners who argue the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission (FERC) had no right to delegate authority to Mountain Valley Pipeline (MVP) to use eminent domain to cross land, including the land owned by the small group of uppity landowners in Virginia (see 
Last week MDN told you that WhiteHawk Energy, headquartered in Philadelphia with ownership of mineral and royalty interests for 850,000 gross unit acres and over 2,500 producing horizontal shale wells between the Marcellus and the Haynesville, had proposed marriage to PHX Minerals, based in Fort Worth, Texas, owner of 75,000 leased mineral acres principally located in the SCOOP and Haynesville plays (see 
Folks new to the Marcellus/Utica may not know this, but Chesapeake Energy’s then-CEO Aubrey McClendon first “discovered” the Ohio Utica about 15 years ago. Under McClendon, Chesapeake spent over $2 billion acquiring rights to drill 1.3 million acres in Ohio–or roughly 5% of the state’s land area. McClendon pegged the value of the Utica for Ohio at half a trillion dollars. He famously said the Ohio Utica is “the biggest thing economically to hit Ohio, since maybe the plow.” McClendon was tossed out of the company he founded by corporate raider Carl Icahn, so he started a new company (to target the Ohio Utica) that eventually became Ascent Resources. Tragically, McClendon died in March 2016, so he never got to see his dream turn into reality (see 
We have U.S. Senator Joe Manchin (lib Dem from WV) to thank for passing the so-called Inflation Reduction Act (IRA) one year ago (see