Biden Lets States Violate Law by Allowing > 1 Yr Water Permit Reviews
When the executive branch of the federal government operates outside the law and nobody holds them to account, we have a lawless country. Under federal, established law, states have a maximum of one year to review applications for pipeline permits under Section 401 of the Clean Water Act. Yet now the Biden administration and its rogue EPA is telling states they can take all the time they want to review these permits, instructing “co-regulators” like the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission (FERC) it’s OK if states go beyond one year. What a disaster. This is yet one more way Biden gets around the law in his mission to destroy the fossil fuel sector.
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Last week both Pennsylvania and West Virginia issued permits to drill new shale wells. Ohio remained skunked for a fifth week in a row. PA issued 18 new shale permits, mainly in the western part of the state (a few in the northeast). WV issued 7 new shale permits, all of them for the same pad being drilled by EQT in Wetzel County. This is the second week in a row EQT scored all of WV’s new permits, and the second week in a row they were all in Wetzel County.
NATIONAL: USA holds largest oil reserves sale in 7 years; House passes $3.5T Biden blueprint after deal with moderates; INTERNATIONAL: Russia is pumping a lot less natural gas to Europe all of a sudden — and it is not clear why.
You can’t miss the breathless headlines, many of which are misleading, that big oil and gas companies are beginning to force employees to get vaccinated for COVID-19. What’s missing from the headlines, especially those touting Chevron’s new vaccine mandate, is the all-important word “some,” as in “some” employees who work in tight quarters for long periods (like offshore platforms) are being required to get vaccinated.
Henri, the huuuuge, “first hurricane to hit New England in 30 years” storm, turned out to be a relative nothingburger. Some 100,000 electric and gas customers lost service for a day or so. We don’t minimize the pain and trauma they experienced, but frankly, Henri was minimal compared to most hurricanes that strike land in the U.S. Already the spot price for natural gas in places like Boston and New York City (and elsewhere across the M-U) is soaring once again. It’s hot and humid in the northeast, and natural gas is needed to power air conditioners and electric power plants, driving up demand. That’s good for drillers and landowners.
A far-left “environmental” group calling itself POWER pretends to be religious in nature. Perhaps it is religious–the religion of worshipping the creation instead of worshipping the Creator. The Pennsylvania-based group claims fossil fuels are racist, that fossil fuel companies intentionally target communities of color to install pipelines, compressor stations, and oil/gas wells. Yes, these people are wack in their views. But they have the ear of PA’s failed governor, Tom Wolf, and they intend to try and pack the state’s Public Utility Commission (PUC) with people who are as equally wack as they are.
A natural gas-fired electric power plant planned for Charles City County (near Richmond, Va.) by NOVI Energy known as C4GT (Charles City Combined-Cycle Gas Turbine) is officially dead as of last month (see 
Since 2017 we’ve had our eye on a proposed natural gas-fired power plant, tracking the project in our “best of the rest” stories. The Nemadji Trail Energy Center would be built near Superior, Wisconsin but provide much of its electricity to nearby Minnesota. We don’t believe any of the molecules slated to flow to the plant will come from the Marcellus/Utica, so the project has never risen to the level of getting its own dedicated post here on MDN–until today. No, we still don’t believe M-U gas will power the plant, but a recent court decision about the plant caught our eye and gave us hope that other places like New York may yet be salvageable.
Oilfield services (OFS) companies are bouncing back. Oil and natural gas drilling is “ramping up as demand continues to hold on despite a global resurgence of coronavirus infections.” And that is “sweet music to the ears of oil-field services providers in the United States.” So says Dan Eberhart. He should know. Eberhart is CEO of Canary, one of the largest privately-owned OFS companies in the United States. He also serves as a consultant to the energy industry in North America, Asia, and Africa. Eberhart, writing on the Forbes website, says drilling and equipment contractors “are preparing for a multi-year upcycle on the back of recovering demand and rising commodity prices.”
Several mainstream media outlets who either didn’t read or intentionally lie about the results revealed in a new study are reporting a link between fracking and impacts on surface waters–particularly in the Marcellus Shale. In fact, the study, published in the journal Science, shows the authors found no such link. They found “a small increase in certain ions associated with hydraulic fracturing across several locations” that likely come from accidental spills of brine. And those slight increases disappear after a few months.
Yesterday the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette published a puff piece praising Brian Anderson, director of the National Energy Technology Laboratory (NETL) and now the head of the Biden administration’s Interagency Working Group on Coal and Power Plant Communities and Economic Revitalization, an effort to kill the use of fossil fuels (see 
