DRBC has “Taken” $1.3B from Northern Wayne County, PA Landowners
On Monday MDN told you about a cool new website called LandGate that offers instant valuations for oil and gas rights sitting under a property, along with the location of wells drilled nearby (see Free Website Helps M-U Landowners Estimate O&G Values). MDN friend Tom Shepstone (Natural Gas Now) built on our discovery by using LandGate to calculate the value that has been destroyed by the Delaware River Basin Commission (DRBC) and their ongoing “temporary” ban on fracking in northern Wayne County, PA.
Read More “DRBC has “Taken” $1.3B from Northern Wayne County, PA Landowners”
Last week MDN told you that the judges of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fourth Circuit signaled they will overturn, for a second time, a permit issued by the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers that allows the 92% completed Mountain Valley Pipeline (MVP) from finishing its work by installing pipe under or through creeks and rivers (see 
Although we shared the good news today that production in the Marcellus/Utica is up in December (see Higher Regional Prices/Demand Leads to Record M-U Dec. Production), we now share the not-so-good news that the number of permits issued in November in Pennsylvania, the biggest M-U producing state, dropped 57% year-over-year.
Last week Pennsylvania issued just 3 new shale well drilling permits–all for Cabot Oil & Gas in Susquehanna County. Ohio issued 5 new permits, with 4 of the 5 issued to Ascent Resources. And West Virginia issued 3 new shale well permits.
OTHER U.S. REGIONS: Corpus Christi LNG Train 3 first commissioning cargo loaded; GWTI inks GTL patent agreement with the University of Texas Arlington; NATIONAL: Oilfield services sector lost 91,680 jobs due to coronavirus; Top 3 challenges to mitigating gas flaring & why ESG investors should care; Kinder Morgan to cut spending further in 2021 amid uneven US midstream recovery; U.S. crude output to decline more than previously forecast in 2020; Shale oil slump burns private equity interest; INTERNATIONAL: Brazil’s oil major believes net zero emissions is a ‘fad’.
Tomorrow the Harrison County Commission will consider (and most likely approve) an extension for an option to purchase property at the site of a proposed natural gas-fired power plant in Harrison County. Energy Solutions Consortium (ESC) currently has an option to buy the site of a proposed 550-megawatt natural gas-fired power plant, but the option expires on Dec. 31 of this year.
Do political, agenda-driven “researchers” never tire of spinning false narratives around fracking? When Michael Bloomberg pays your salary (as he does for researchers at the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health), apparently not. Back in 2016, Brian Schwartz, a fellow at the Post Carbon Institute (virulent anti-fossil fuel group) was among a group of researchers who published a junk science report claiming fracking in PA gives you headaches (see 
Yesterday MDN brought you a post about the dramatic increase in natural gas-fired electric plants in the Marcellus/Utica, particularly Pennsylvania (see 
The Independent Oil and Gas Association of West Virginia (IOGAWV) and the West Virginia Oil and Natural Gas Association (WVONGA), West Virginia’s two oil and gas trade associations, announced yesterday their members have voted to merge the two into one new organization called the Gas and Oil Association of WV (GO-WV).
While so-called “activist investors” can sometimes accomplish good things (like the Rice boys in their takeover of EQT last year), it is our observation that most “activist investors” are destructive. A new hedge fund calling itself Engine No. 1 is one such destructive company. The hedge fund, based in San Francisco (which explains a lot) has ExxonMobil in its sights, attempting a hostile takeover of the company by getting four of its own candidates named to the board, and after that, forcing Exxon (an oil company) to forsake oil drilling and focus on “clean energy.”
Coincidentally, a second dehydration unit fire occurred early Saturday morning, also in Pennsylvania, but this second fire occurred across the state in southwest PA. Our lead story today is about a dehydration unit fire at a well pad in Lycoming County (see Two-Alarm Fire at Alta Resources Well Pad in Lycoming County, PA). The second fire happened at a dehydration unit at a compressor station in Greene County owned and operated by Equitrans Midstream.
After selling Rice Energy to EQT in 2017, the four Rice brothers, all of whom worked at Rice Energy (and left after the merger), launched a new venture (see 
New Jersey Resources Corp. (NJR), one of five owners in the PennEast Pipeline (with a 20% stake), had some interesting things to say about the PennEast project during its annual Analyst Day event held last Monday. NJR CEO Stephen Westhoven said during the virtual event that “uncertainty around an in-service date” has prompted his company to pull the project “completely” from its financial growth projections through 2024. What does that mean?