West Virginia Forced Pooling Bill is Dead for Another Year
Almost every year during the West Virginia legislature’s 60-day regular session (which happens at the beginning of each year) a forced pooling bill gets introduced. It happened again this year (see WV Makes a New Push for Forced Pooling Using New WVU Study). Just like every other year going back at least seven years, this year’s forced pooling bill has become mired in debate and will not make it out of committee for a vote.
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In February West Virginia Gov. Jim Justice announced a plan to eliminate the state’s personal income tax. In order to replace the $2.1 billion received annually from the personal income tax, Justice would raise other taxes, including a tiered system that potentially raises the state’s oil and gas severance tax…potentially by a lot (see 
Olympus Energy, the renamed Huntley & Huntley Energy Exploration (HHEX), concentrates its drilling in the Pittsburgh suburbs, including Upper Burrell and Allegheny Townships in Westmoreland County, PA. Olympus has just cut a $1.2 million deal with the Municipal Authority of the City of New Kensington to extend three miles of waterlines near three Marcellus well sites in Upper Burrell and Allegheny Townships.
Whether or not drilling companies have the right to deduct post-production expenses (processing the gas, pipeline transportation, etc.) has raged for more than a decade here in the Marcellus/Utica. Even if landowners have ironclad, very specific language in the contract prohibiting post-production deductions from royalties, some companies (*cough* Chesapeake Energy *cough*) still find ways to claim deductions anyway, leading to expensive and years-long lawsuits that benefit the lawyers more than anyone else. A decision in a recent Texas Supreme Court case gives landowners in the M-U some hope.
For years Vermont has made millions of dollars selling Renewable Energy Credits (RECs) to other states–a scam that allows pretentious environmentalists to claim they’re helping out the environment when in fact they still burn the same fossil fuels and biomass (i.e. woodburning) as they always did by paying a fee, a REC, and absolving themselves of feeling bad about it. Think of modern-day RECs like the Catholic Church selling indulgences in the Middle Ages to absolve you of your sins, or at least lessen the punishment for your sins. RECs are the new indulgences of the post-everything era we live in now. Selling REC indulgences is about to go away for Vermonters, and it may lead to widespread blackouts.
Joe Biden is proposing an insane “infrastructure” plan that will run into the trillions of dollars. All of that money comes from somewhere folks. Money is not free and you can’t simply print it forever without inflation going haywire and the U.S. becoming the new Venezuela. But we digress. As part of spending more money on infrastructure, Biden is looking to change the 50-year-old National Environmental Policy Act (NEPA), which regulates construction of infrastructure, by putting back into place strangling regulations that Donald Trump relaxed so it doesn’t take a decade to build a new road.
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We don’t write much about Alta Resources, a shale drilling company co-founded by the inventor of shale fracking, George Mitchell. But that doesn’t mean Alta doesn’t drill in the Marcellus. In 2020 Alta was in the Top 10 PA drillers list (see 
In May 2020 the Pennsylvania Supreme Court heard oral arguments in a case challenging whether or not the state Attorney General’s office has the right to use a consumer protection law to prosecute companies like Chesapeake Energy and Anadarko over royalty payment shenanigans (see 
The flaky Federal Energy Regulatory Commission (FERC) Commissioner Neil Chatterjee, who lately has taken to stabbing natural gas pipelines in the back (see 
Over the past few years, radicalized environmentalists have taken the law into their own hands in an effort to block pipeline construction. Some of the more wacky ones decided to build themselves tree stands and live, full-time, up in the top of trees that are in the path of Mountain Valley Pipeline (MVP). Their aim was to prevent the trees from being cut down, ultimately blocking construction of the pipeline (see 
In a brilliant move aimed at boxing in the Delaware River Basin Commission (DRBC), two northeastern Pennsylvania State Senators–Gene Yaw and Lisa Baker–along with members of the PA Senate Republican Caucus (27 Senators in all), filed a lawsuit in January against the DRBC accusing the quasi-governmental agency of “taking” the property rights of PA residents without just compensation under the law (see 
Finally! After months and months of dithering around, the Ohio legislature has passed a bill that will overturn and rescind House Bill (HB) 6, the legislation that got passed due to $61 million in bribes spread around by FirstEnergy in what has become Ohio’s biggest bribery scandal ever (see 
Yesterday MDN friend Joe Barone and ShaleDirectories.com hosted the 
Shame on the American Petroleum Institute (API) and its CEO Mike Sommers. They’ve just sold out the oil and gas industry by caving to pressure from their biggest donors (companies like Exxon, Shell and Chevron), embracing a universal carbon tax on the very product they all produce–oil and gas. API is sowing the seeds of its own destruction, but either the API (Big Oil) believes it can cheat death, or is too stupid to understand the end result of their actions. Embracing a carbon tax is terrible news for the shale industry. If you work for a company that belongs to the traitorous API, pressure your management to drop its membership NOW.
The Enervus U.S. rig count continues to climb (a very good sign). For the week ending March 24, the U.S. rig count climbed another 11 active rigs to 513. The oil-focused Permian Basin added eight new rigs. The Marcellus stayed even at 33 active rigs while the Ohio Utica picked up one active rig and now has 12 active rigs. The other major shale gas play, the Haynesville, stayed even at 47 active rigs.