Energy Services | Industrywide Issues | Litigation | Minuteman Environmental Services | Pennsylvania | Statewide PA
Minuteman’s 5-Year Battle for Justice Against Former PA AG
One of the companies in the Marcellus industry targeted for extinction by Pennsylvania’s former Attorney General, Kathleen Kane, was Minuteman Environmental Services (see PA’s Anti-Drilling AG Charges Minuteman with Enviro Crimes). Kane filed charges against the company in 2014, charges that were later dropped, but in the meantime she forced the company into bankruptcy. Since May 2015, the owner of Minuteman has fought back (i.e. sued) to regain his good name and to ensure prosecutorial abuses like what he’s experienced never happen to anyone else. He continues to fight to this day, and the PA AG’s office continues to block his efforts to obtain justice.
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We wish you a Merry Christmas..and a Happy New Year! MDN will take off (i.e. no new stories posted) between Dec. 24 and New Year’s Day in observance of the holiday season. Don’t worry, we’ll still keep an eye on the news and if anything earth-shattering happens, we’ll post about it. However, our intent is to take a break from writing for an entire week. We will see you again on Thursday, January 2nd.
The Battle Run Compressor Station, owned and operated by Williams and located in Valley Grove (Ohio County), West Virginia, exploded and caught fire Saturday night. Fortunately no one was injured and the fire was extinguished within a half hour. Williams has “isolated” the flow of gas to the facility while the incident is investigated.
Columbia Gas of Ohio (NiSource) recently announced a new $135 million pipeline project to bring new supplies of Utica-sourced natural gas to homes and businesses located north and west of Columbus, in central Ohio. The project, called the Northern Loop Project, will file for regulatory approval with the Ohio Power Siting Board and hopes the OPSB will approve the project in 2020, with construction set to happen in 2022.
Eastern Shore Natural Gas Company (ESNG), a subsidiary company of Chesapeake Utilities Corporation, filed a request with the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission (FERC) in Sept. 2018 to build 19+ miles of new pipeline and new meter and delivery stations in Kent and Sussex counties in Delaware, and Wicomico and Somerset counties in Maryland, to carry more PA Marcellus natural gas to locations in Delaware and Maryland. Last Thursday FERC granted final approval for the project.
Pennsylvania Public Utility Commission Law Judge Elizabeth Barnes has tried to stop or block or otherwise do damage to the Mariner East pipeline projects for years. Most (all?) of her actions against the project have, in the past, been reversed by a vote of PUC Commissioners (see 
In September MDN told you about environmentalist wackos at the Bernheim Arboretum (about 25 miles from Louisville, Kentucky) who refuse to grant an easement for 4,000 feet of land they bought *after* the Louisville Gas and Electric Company (LG&E) already had a state-approved plan to build a new pipeline over that land as part of tiny 12-inch, 12-mile pipeline (see 
Carnegie Mellon University is clearly feeling the heat over their overtly political, unscientific “study” that says Marcellus Shale extraction and the use of that gas is polluting the air and causing man-made global warming–and therefore killing people (see 
Appalachia Development Group is leading an effort to build a ~$10 billion (or $2.5B, or $3.4B, depending on your source) NGL storage hub in Appalachia–most likely in West Virginia (see 
In early November, Gulfport Energy, one of the biggest drillers in the Ohio Utica Shale (210,000 acres), which concentrates its drilling in the Ohio Utica and the Oklahoma SCOOP plays, announced they were shopping some non-operated Ohio Utica assets (see 