NJ Commission Remains Paralyzed on Revoking Pipeline Approval
Another chapter in the long-drawn-out saga of the effort to build a 22-mile pipeline in New Jersey. In February MDN reported that New Jersey radicals had succeeded in scuttling a plan to convert an old coal-fired electric plant into using natural gas (see Cape May NatGas Power Plant Dead – Scrub Pines Pipeline Too?). At the time we raised the question about whether the pipeline that would feed the plant would still get built. A state commission that previously approved the pipeline indicated in March they would unapprove it, given the power plant project is now dead (see NJ Commission Pulls Approval for Short Pipe Thru Scrub Pines). However, the commission still has not officially revoked permission to build the pipeline. Why?
Read More “NJ Commission Remains Paralyzed on Revoking Pipeline Approval”
The best teachers (people) and the best teacher (method of instruction) have the same thing in common: Hands on. As in tactile, doing stuff, rather than sitting in a chair attempting to learn by information dumping. Particularly with elementary-age kiddies. Cabot Oil & Gas and Southwestern Energy recently sponsored the annual Vehicular Career Day where 400 fifth graders from school districts across Susquehanna County climbed into big rigs, buses, and emergency vehicles. The shale industry was well-represented. Needless to say, the kids loved it.
MARCELLUS/UTICA REGION: PA House begins debate on bill to compensate Delaware River watershed drilling rights owners over $10 billion; Wolf makes closing pitch for infrastructure plan ahead of start of budget season; Steel Nation expands operations; OTHER U.S. REGIONS: Broomfield approves six-month oil and gas moratorium; NATIONAL: 6 reasons why it’s time to stand up for natural gas; Bill Nye in defense of the Green New Deal: ‘The planet’s on f—king fire!’; Bipartisan senators seek sanctions on Russian pipeline work.
Listen up landowners in Washington County, OH: For some of you, your shale lease may now be owned by someone else. Pin Oak Energy Partners, a relatively young Marcellus/Utica driller based in Akron, OH, has purchased all of Protégé Energy’s Utica Shale leases (and other assets) located in Washington and Noble counties in Ohio, and Wood County in West Virginia. The vast majority of the lease transfers are in Washington County.
EdgeMarc Energy, headquartered in Canonsburg, PA (with 45,000 acres of Marcellus/Utica leases), is filing for Chapter 11 bankruptcy, looking to sell all of the company’s assets. The reason? They can’t move their production to market because their main pipeline partner, Energy Transfer’s Revolution Pipeline, exploded last September and ET has not been able to get the PA Dept. of Environmental Protection to allow them to restart it.
Speaking of the exploded Revolution Pipeline located in southwestern Pennsylvania that’s led to a driller declaring bankruptcy (see EdgeMarc Energy Files for Bankruptcy, Blames Revolution Pipe Outage), yesterday the PA Dept. of Environmental Protection (DEP) issued an order to Energy Transfer, builder of Revolution, to “identify and restore or mitigate all streams and wetlands that it illegally eliminated or altered during the construction” of the pipeline. DEP claims ET “illegally” eliminated at least 23 streams and changed the length of another 120 streams.
Mountain Valley Pipeline (MVP), being built by Equitrans (formerly EQT Midstream), has just agreed to pay a $265,972 fine and submit a plan of corrective action to West Virginia state regulators to fix storm water runoff caused when building the 303-mile pipeline in the Mountain State.
The Pennsylvania Supreme Court has just upheld a lower court opinion that allows shale drilling to happen *anywhere* in a township, so long as such drilling satisfies standards to protect public health, safety and welfare. This is the end of the road for a lawsuit funded by Big Green that began in 2015 in Westmoreland County, PA.
Advanced Power Services finally breaks ground…TODAY…on building an 1,100 megawatt Utica-fired electric plant in Columbiana County, OH (see 
The Pittsburgh Post-Gazette seems to be doing its best to tie what it calls a “cancer cluster” to local shale drilling in the region. We first noticed a developing story about a potential cluster of rare Ewing sarcoma cancer cases among children in the Pittsburgh region a few months ago, when Pittsburgh media first began to report on it.
In the coming month, the U.S.’s seven major shale plays will produce a cumulative 80.7 billion cubic feet (Bcf) of natural gas, the first time shale production has passed that milestone. Yesterday our favorite government agency, the U.S. Energy Information Administration, issued our favorite monthly report, the Drilling Productivity Report. The DPR is a forecast of oil and gas production in the country’s major shale plays for the coming month, made by the expert number crunchers at EIA. The Marcellus/Utica is forecast to increase production an amazing 1/3 Bcf in the next 30 days, for a second month in a row.
The former Blue Ridge Mountain Resources (formerly Magnum Hunter Resources) and Eclipse Resources tied the knot and merged at the end of February, promptly renaming itself Montage Resources (see 
Guess we should have seen this one coming. Last week MDN told you that U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia rejected an appeal by the rich snobs from Cooperstown that call themselves Otsego 2000, challenging the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission’s (FERC) approval of Dominion Energy’s New Market Project to build two new compressor stations in Upstate NY (see 
You know who anti-vaxxers are, right? The parents who won’t give their children vaccines because they fear the vaccines may give their kids autism or allergies. Because of this anti-vaxxer movement, there’s been a recent resurgence in measles–particularly in New York City. A group calling themselves Physicians for Social Responsibility is trotting out scare tactics to oppose a pipeline compressor station in Weymouth, Massachusetts. One writer calls them the anti-vaxxers of energy. We love it!