Marcellus & Utica Shale Story Links: Fri, Jan 26, 2018
The “best of the rest”–stories that caught MDN’s eye over the break that you may be interested in reading. In today’s lineup: Chevron gives $630,000 for workforce dev programs in PA, WV, OH; PA Senate meeting to consider resolution to end state forest drilling moratorium; re-write of Oil & Gas Act for conventional drillers; Range Resources stock price plunges after 5-year outlook released; highlights from WV IOGA winter meeting; New England to lean more on natgas as coal ends in 2025; cold weather heats up natgas market; they aren’t drilling shale wells like they used to; an unsolvable natural gas dilemma; and more!
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Yesterday Range Resources released a pair of press releases. One outlines a high level overview for what the company will spend in 2018 and beyond, for the next five years. The other release trumpets Range’s “proved reserves.” As for 2018, Range says they are reducing the amount of money they will spend to drill this year versus what they spent last year. Range previously said they would spend $1.15 billion this year. That’s now been reduced to $941 million. Last year Range spent $1.27 billion, so this year’s spending is down 26% over last year. That’s a pretty hefty decrease. The good news is that Range will spend 80% of this year’s budget on drilling in the Marcellus, mainly in southwestern Pennsylvania. Even though Range will spend and drill less this year, they predict production will grow another 25%. As for the 5-year outlook, Range says almost all growth will come in the Marcellus (not the Louisiana Haynesville, their other drilling location). Range still has some 3,200 locations where they can drill new wells. Range CEO Jeff Ventura says shale has entered a “new era” of shale development where companies (like Range) have “captured the most prolific resources” and will now switch to focus on returns for shareholders. Translation: We won’t be drilling as much as we did in the past so we can concentrate on bottom line profitability. Which explains why Range is spending less this year than last. In the release Range calls the Marcellus its “flagship asset” and clearly signals the company will keep its focus here, in our region. As for proved reserves (how much gas and oil is in the ground, retrievable with today’s technology and at today’s costs), Range says proved reserves as of December 31 increased by 26% from the prior-year, now at 15.3 trillion cubic feet equivalent (Tcfe). That’s alotta gas! We have the Range announcements below, along with an updated PowerPoint slide deck chocked full of useful information…
At the end of last year Chesapeake Energy offered a $30 million olive branch to Pennsylvania landowners to settle claims the company had screwed them out of royalty money by artificially inflating post-production costs in an elaborate scheme to pocket more money at landowners’ expense (see 
The Ohio EPA continues its yapping insistence that the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission (FERC) *permanently* shut down underground horizontal directional drilling (HDD) work being done by Rover Pipeline near the Tuscarawas River over concerns that nontoxic (totally safe) drilling mud keeps disappearing down the borehole. FERC listened, sort of. In an order dated yesterday, FERC told Rover to *temporarily* stop HDD work at Tuscarawas until Rover can outline a plan for moving forward that FERC has confidence will address concerns over the disappearing drilling mud. When mud used for drilling holes comes out on the surface any place other than the hole from which it went down, it’s called an “inadvertent return.” We call it a leak. However, if that same mud never comes back to the surface, as sometimes happens, it’s fine. Except when it’s a LOT of mud, as is the case in drilling near Tuscarawas where a cumulative 200,000 gallons of it have disappeared down hole, not (so far) coming back out. Sooner or later it seems likely that at least some of that mud will come back to the surface–somewhere. That’s the concern that no doubt prompted FERC to send Rover a letter yesterday telling them to (for now) stop HDD work at Tuscarawas…
You may recall our story about the daughter of a Huntingdon County, PA landowner who took to a tree on her mom’s property in March 2016 in order to illegally stop crews working on tree clearing for the Mariner East 2 pipeline (see 
In 2016 the Pennsylvania legislature, over the objections of PA Gov. Tom Wolf, voted to shift $24 million away from a boondoggle program called the PA Alternative Energy Investment Act and into a new program called the Pipeline Investment Program, or PIPE (see 
That didn’t take long. We knew it wouldn’t. Last Friday the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission (FERC) gave its full, final approval for the PennEast Pipeline project, a $1 billion, 120-mile primarily 36-inch natural gas pipeline that will stretch from Dallas (Luzerne County), PA to Transco’s pipeline interconnection near Pennington (Mercer County), NJ. (see 
On Tuesday, two left-leaning, Harrisburg-based Democrat groups with innocent sounding names–the Keystone Research Center and the Pennsylvania Budget and Policy Center–introduced what they labeled as “The Pennsylvania Promise” during a presentation in the Capitol Rotunda. We call it “The Pennsylvania Grand Theft.” No doubt inspired by autocrat Andrew Cuomo in the state next door and his “free college tuition” program, the groups want to give away a “free” college education to PA residents who go to a PA state college or university. Of course nothing is free. The program would cost $1 billion a year and would be funded in part by (you guessed it), a Marcellus Shale severance tax. The personal state income tax would also go up in order to help pay for this “free” program. How is this not theft? Transferring money from those who work hard to earn it–to those who don’t. Government theft, plain and simple. We have such a program here in New York State and people are leaving our state in DROVES. Year in and year out NY loses population, particularly in the Upstate region. Socialism, the transference of wealth from those who earn it to those who don’t (or won’t), eventually breaks down when the earners get tired of being shaken down by their government and move away. That’s what will happen in PA if a cockamamie plan like “The Pennsylvania Promise” is adopted…
Here’s something truly ALLARMing: Over the past eight years the group Alliance for Aquatic Resource Monitoring (ALLARM) has conducted more than 70 workshops to train volunteer “citizen scientists” in how to test local creeks and rivers to detect the least little hint of pollution coming from the Marcellus Shale industry. Eight years! And what have they found in all that time? Nothing. Not one, single, thing. If they had, it would be front page news for days and weeks and months. Don’t get us wrong, if they want to be out there in Mother Nature testing, keeping an eye on things, we’re all for it. Knock yourselves out. Our point: Nothing has been found. Yet ALLARM continues to conduct their “free” workshops to this day. Somebody is making money somewhere on this environmentalist scheme, we’re not sure how. At any rate, the ALLARMists are hooking up with the anti-drillers of Protect Penn-Trafford to conduct another of their “free” training sessions, called Shale Gas Stream Monitoring Workshop, in Westmoreland County in February…
Last night MDN editor Jim Willis attended a Zoning Appeals Board hearing in the Town of Fenton (near Binghamton) where board members held a public hearing on a proposed virtual pipeline (i.e. compressor station) application by NG Advantage. It was, for Jim, a real eye-opener–causing him to reassess previous comments he made about the people opposing the project. Let’s begin with a brief background and the purpose of the hearing. NG previously filed an application with the Town of Fenton to build a natural gas compressor station/trucking facility in the very corner of the township, where it borders other towns/communities (bedroom communities). The people in those adjoining communities, when they learned of the plan, were upset that they had not been notified of the plan. In short order lawsuits were filed, and a county judge ruled that the Town of Fenton Planning Board did not take a hard enough look at environmental and traffic issues related to their approval of NG’s plan (see 
Yesterday saw the first two of six public hearings held by the Delaware River Basin Commission (DRBC) on their plan to permanently ban fracking in the Delaware River Basin. The hearings were held in Waymart (Wayne County), PA. The DRBC frack ban would essentially ban shale drilling in two northeastern PA counties: Wayne and Pike. Landowners there have been battling the DRBC going on 10 years. At first it was a temporary ban (like New York’s). Now it has metastasized into a full blow permanent ban–if DRBC gets its way. Below we have two reports–one from mainstream media, the other from MDN friend Tom Shepstone, who hilariously was called “Crapstone” by an anti addressing one of the hearings. You know you’re being effective when they start calling you silly names! Tom said it was landowners versus special interest group groupies at both hearings. Here’s an update on what happened…
In December members of Virginia’s Water Control Board voted 4-3 to approve issuing a water permit/certification for the Atlantic Coast Pipeline (ACP) project (see