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PA DEP Hires Private Lawyers to Defend Against Atty General Probe
Really? Is this what it’s now come to? Pennsylvania Attorney General Josh Shapiro is so desperate to make a criminal case against someone, anyone, in the shale industry, he’s even going after state employees–workers at the PA Dept. of Environmental Protection (DEP). In a bid to raise his visibility among state voters (so he can run for governor), Shapiro launched an investigation in January looking for environmental “crimes” committed by Range Resources and other shale drillers (see PA AG Investigates Shale Drillers for “Enviro Crimes”).
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Yesterday the Consumer Energy Alliance (CEA) released its West Virginia Emissions Brief (full copy below) which shows significant emissions reductions and environmental improvements made across the state. This brief further demonstrates that states can reap the rewards of energy production while practicing sound environmental stewardship simultaneously. Although West Virginia is now the seventh-largest natural gas producer in the country and one of the largest consumers of energy per capita, statewide carbon dioxide emissions have fallen 64% since 1990. And Sulfur dioxide emissions are down 94%!
In New York State it’s not popular–frankly it’s not safe–if you’re a Democrat who opposes mob boss Andrew Cuomo for any reason/any issue. Yet six Long Island State Senators, all Democrats, are doing just that. The six sent a letter to Basil Seggos, who runs the Dept. of Environmental Conservation (DEC) and does whatever Cuomo tells him to do, asking Seggos to provisionally approve the Williams Northeast Supply Enhancement (NESE) pipeline project.
If you send your kids to Lehigh University (Bethlehem, PA) and they take political science classes, you might want to consider another school. One of their professors has just penned what is one of the most outrageous op-eds we’ve ever read. He claims those who operate “fossil fuel” companies–oil and gas companies–and those (of us) who “deny” that there is such as thing as catastrophic man-made global warming caused by burning fossil fuels, are guilty of “crimes against humanity.”
MARCELLUS/UTICA REGION: Dominion Energy announces organizational changes; Welding together careers for the future in Susquehanna County; OTHER U.S. REGIONS: Rhode Island falls behind emissions goals, study shows; NATIONAL: Kimmeridge closes fifth E&P-focused fund at $800 million hard cap; Long-term SPAs keep U.S. LNG exports stable amid global price volatility; INTERNATIONAL: EIA projects that renewables will provide nearly half of world electricity by 2050; TDs, senators and Hollywood actors round on the government over US fracked gas being used in Ireland; Norway sovereign wealth fund to divest oil explorers, keep refiners.
On Monday MDN brought you the news that NextEra Energy, largely a renewables company, has made the bold move of buying 39% of the Central Penn Line, otherwise known as Williams’ Atlantic Sunrise Pipeline project (see 
In September 2018, the 1,050-megawatt Moxie Freedom Marcellus-fired power plant located near Wilkes-Barre, PA (Luzerne County) went online, feeding the electricity it produces into the local power grid (see 
Our friends at RBN Energy launched a new mini-series of blog posts delving into Marcellus/Utica gas processing and fractionation back in August. The first post in the series dealt with an overview of processing and fractionation in the wet gas region–meaning southwest PA, eastern OH, and the northern panhandle of WV (see 
IHS Markit, a global analytics company that tracks data in the oil and gas industry, recently published a new report titled “IHS Markit Conventional Exploration Results in Early 2018 Through 2019: No Rebound in Activity or Results.” Although we don’t have a copy of the full report, we do have IHS Markit’s excellent summary of the report. Here’s how we summarize their summary: Conventional (vertical only) drilling for oil and gas is pretty much dead and will remain dead–and shale killed it.
A group of Ohio landowners sued Chesapeake Energy in 2015 in a class action, alleging that Chesapeake had shorted them on royalty payments (see