PA Supreme Court Gives Drillers Victory in Chapter 78a Regs Case
In August, the Pennsylvania Commonwealth Court handed PA drillers a partial victory in their quest to block onerous new drilling regulations, part of something called Chapter 78a (see Partial Victory for PA Drillers re DEP Chapter 78a Drilling Regs). This issue involves an effort by the liberal Gov. Tom Wolf administration to impose onerous new regulations on the Marcellus industry, costing lots of money with virtually no environmental benefits. The Marcellus Shale Coalition, on behalf of the industry, fought back and won in Commonwealth Court. The state Dept. of Environmental Protection appealed the case to the PA Supreme Court, and yesterday the Supremes quashed the appeal–said they refuse to hear it. Meaning the decision by the Commonwealth Court stands. The Marcellus industry won, and the DEP lost.
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Reuters has published a “hit piece” against Energy Transfer (ET) and two of its recent big pipeline projects–Rover Pipeline (in Ohio & Michigan), and Mariner East 2 Pipeline (in Ohio and Pennsylvania). Reuters is usually more balanced than, say, Bloomberg with these types of articles. Reuters usually doesn’t go out of its way to denigrate the industry. The article evaluates the number of permit violations issued for both projects. Together that number exceeds 800. Is that a lot? Reuters says they’ve analyzed “four comparable pipeline projects” and found an average of 19 violations per project (or 38 for two projects). So yeah, 800 vs. 38 sure sounds like a lot to us.
You know those Pilot Flying J truck stops you sometimes visit to fill up as you’re traveling along our nation’s interstate highways? They’re not just big gas stations with convenience stores. Pilot Flying J has its own fleet of trucks. One of the divisions of Flying J targets the exploration and production (E&P) sector, i.e. drillers. Flying J has just announced it has bought out Equipment Transport, LLC, which hauls shale wastewater in the Marcellus, Utica and Permian Basin. Now your favorite truck stop is also your favorite wastewater hauler!
Both Pittsburgh and Philadelphia were in the running to become Headquarters 2 (HQ2) for online shopping behemoth Amazon. But neither got it. They both bent over backward, forward, and sideways, wined and dined Amazon people, and in general did everything they could short of bribery to attract Amazon to their respective cities. In the end, Amazon decided to split HQ2 between New York City and a suburb of Washington, D.C. Now that the distraction of pursuing Amazon is gone, a couple of energy industry players in Pittsburgh say it’s time to focus again on reality. Amazon offered 50,000 jobs to the winner(s) of HQ2. The PA Marcellus industry offers 100,000 jobs that pay way more, IF we hurry to capitalize on it. So says Morgan O’Brien, president and CEO of Peoples Natural Gas, and Stacey Olson, president of Chevron Appalachia.
The “best of the rest”–stories that caught MDN’s eye that you may be interested in reading: PARTA celebrates opening of first natural gas station in Portage County; Residents at forum decry Longmeadow Country Club deal with Tennessee Gas Pipeline Co.; Developers push for relief from the natural gas moratorium; Columbia Gas to give another $10M re tragedy; Supreme Court questions ‘habitat’ definition in remanding ESA case; Obama takes credit for U.S. oil-and-gas boom: ‘That was me, people’; Energy Department investing in research to develop natural gas-based hydraulic fracturing fluid; Natural gas jumps as cold air descends on U.S. Midwest; Canada’s oil and natural gas industry and Indigenous peoples work toward shared prosperity.
MDN previously told you about a natural gas-fired electric plant planned for the socialist paradise of Rhode Island, home to old money and people who oppose change of any kind (see 
Emera Inc., an energy services company headquartered in Halifax, Nova Scotia, has just signed a deal to sell three natural gas-fired electric plants that it owns in New England to investment firm Carlyle Group for $590 million. The three plants–Bridgeport Energy, Tiverton Power and Rumford Power–collectively generate 1,100 megawatts of electricity. We’re always interested in such transactions because of the potential to sell Marcellus/Utica gas to feed the plants. The Carlyle Group owns a number of assets in the M-U region, perhaps most prominently the Philadelphia Energy Solutions (PES) refinery.
Last week MDN told you about seven anti-fossil fuelers in the Philadelphia area who have filed a request with the PA Public Utility Commission requesting the PUC shut down both the Mariner East 1 pipeline, which has been flowing since 2016, and Mariner East 2 pipeline, which is about to go online any day now (see 
In November 2015, MDN first reported on a zoning court case in Westmoreland County, PA that’s still playing out (see 
Pennsylvania has had a seriously bad problem with acid mine drainage for years–water that washes through old/abandoned coal mines that comes back out heavily laden with minerals that make it acidic and a danger to the environment. More recently, with the shale revolution, PA has also found itself with an abundance of shale wastewater–most of it “produced” water that comes from deep in the earth (not surface drinking water), also laden with all sorts of minerals. Both acid mine water and shale wastewater are not easy to treat. Some sharp kids and their professors at the University of Pittsburgh got the bright idea to combine the two together, and treat them together, at the same time. Why? Because they have opposite amounts of barium and sulfates. Combine the two and you can more easily remove the nasty stuff via “precipitation.” How cool is that?
We bring you the following story purely for your (and our) entertainment. Dominion Energy, a huge company with its fingers in many energy pies (pipelines, LNG exports, power generation, utility company), is teaming up with the world’s largest pork producer, Smithfield, to “harness methane gas from thousands of malodorous hog lagoons.” That is, they will capture methane from pig poop and use that methane to “heat homes and combat climate change.” (Excuse us while we get up off the floor from laughing so hard!) The story comes from the well known fake news purveyor Washington Post, so we can’t be 100% sure of its accuracy. But we’ll go with it, simply for laughs.
Still no sign from PTT Global Chemical that they will announce a final decision to proceed with building a $6 billion ethane cracker in Belmont County, OH, by the end of this year. The project was first announced in April 2015 (see 
This one will make your head explode. We’ve been warning about this for some time, or rather, RBN Energy has been warning about it (and we’ve brought you their warnings). During a recent three hour period of natural gas trading at the Waha Hub (in West Texas), the price of gas went to negative 1 cent per thousand cubic feet (Mcf). You read that right. Someone was paying someone else to buy the gas from them! Why? Too much “associated gas” being produced in the prolific Permian Basin, and not enough pipelines to carry it to other markets. The Permian is all about oil drilling. Natural gas is a byproduct, to the point it may be worth giving it away for free just to get rid of it so a driller can keep pumping oil. The proliferation of natgas in the region is driving prices into the subbasement.