Thank God Trump Got Us Out of Paris Climate Shakedown Deal
Yesterday French President Emmanuel Macron held a “One Planet Summit” to mark the second anniversary of the idiotic Paris Climate Accord–an agreement that was nothing more than an elaborate shakedown/theft of American money. How do we know? Because the big promoters of the accord–France and Germany–refuse to put up their own money to fund the goal of lowering carbon dioxide emissions. Yeah, they wanted the U.S. to be the patsies paying for the party. Back in June President Trump pledged to pull the U.S. out of the Paris farce (see Three Cheers! Trump Pulls U.S. Out of Horrible Paris Climate Treaty). The United States would have been punished economically–transferring billions of our taxpayer dollars to other countries for generations to come. All in the name of supposedly stopping global warming. China and India would get to add as many coal-fired electric plants as they want, while we would have to close ours down, essentially shifting our jobs to other countries. The deal was bad from the beginning. Even if we had stayed in and even if all countries lived up to their obligations (i.e. paid their “fair” share) under the treaty, the projected difference in lowering global temps by 2100 would have been 0.17 Celsius–little more than one-tenth of a degree. After spending hundreds of billions of dollars. THIS PLAN WAS INSANE from the start. But you won’t learn that from mainstream media. So Marcon threw a big party to honor the treaty (with people arriving in their carbon-belching planes and trains and trucks and cars and SUVs). Even those who support this flummery and yesterday’s big party could not avoid pointing out that with the U.S. gone, nobody is willing to pay for the party…
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The “best of the rest” – stories that caught MDN’s eye that you may be interested in reading. In today’s lineup: Rover Pipeline donates $270,000 to local first responders; tech training needed in WV with China big investment; PennEast concerns unfounded; Tellurian raises $94.8M for LNG export plant; EIA bashers should check their own crude oil numbers; US exporting oil & gas at a record pace; Texas research finds no link between fracking and water contamination; Stanford’s renewables map to nowhere; Germany supports Russian natgas pipeline; and more!
Eclipse Resources, a Marcellus/Utica pure play driller headquartered in State College, PA, drills almost exclusively in the Ohio Utica. That is, until now! Yesterday Eclipse announced it has purchased 44,500 acres of oil and gas leases and producing wells in Tioga and Potter counties in north central Pennsylvania for $93.7 million–which works out to be ~$1,900/acre (very low cost). The aim of the purchase is to drill in the Pennsylvania Utica Shale. For the past few years MDN has heard about/highlighted stories of drillers going after the Utica Shale in PA–particularly in Tioga County (see 
Banpu Pcl, Thailand’s largest coal producer, in cooperation with their American-based partner Kalnin Ventures, has just snapped up their sixth piece of the Marcellus Shale–once again in northeast Pennsylvania. Kalnin announced this morning they have cut a deal, using $105 million of Banpu’s money, to buy an unspecified amount of Marcellus acreage and 35 producing shale wells in Wyoming County, PA from Warren Resources. Based on a previous Kalnin story, yesterday’s announcement, and the Warren Resources website, MDN believes the total acreage involved is 5,289 net acres (6,982 gross). Which doesn’t seem like much. But you have to view the purchase in context. That $105 million paid is mostly for the producing 35 wells (roughly $3M per well). Plus, the acreage is no doubt adjacent to previous acreage and wells Kalnin/Banpu bought in Wyoming County back in May (see 
Cabot Oil & Gas is tired of being sued, and slandered, by people like Dimock resident Ray Kemble and his ambulance-chasing lawyers. So in August Cabot sued back–for $5 million (see 
EQT, now the largest natural gas producer in the United States since adding Rice Energy to the fold, has major assets in West Virginia–wells and leased acreage. The company also has a lot of influence in the state–in the judiciary (see 
In October, local officials in Plum, PA (Allegheny County) approved a plan by Huntley & Huntley (H&H) to drill a series of Marcellus wells on a single well pad in their municipality (see 
We found this story illustrative of the rank hypocrisy so prevalent in our beloved home state of New York. Even the most cursory follower of shale energy knows that our corrupt governor, Andrew Cuomo, decided to ban shale fracking in the Empire State in 2015 (see 
Yesterday the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals in California (sometimes referred to as the Ninth Circus) heard arguments from the Trump Administration, representing the federal government, and from lawyers representing children they are mentally abusing and who have filed a lawsuit that aims to force the end of the use of all fossil fuels in the United States–in the name of so-called man-made global warming (see yesterday’s post for background: 
Yes, we must revisit the topic of “fracking causes earthquakes” yet again (sigh). But maybe this time something good will come of our discussion. Researchers at Stanford University (crazy California) have discovered a way to detect thousands of faint, “previously missed earthquakes” triggered by fracking and by injection wells. “The technique can be used to monitor seismic activities at fracking operations to help reduce the likelihood of bigger, potentially damaging earthquakes from occurring,” according to a published research study. By now you know our standard explanation, the facts about fracking and earthquakes: (1) Injection wells can and do cause detectable earthquakes–when they are located over faults. (2) Fracking shale wells rarely causes detectable earthquakes. We know of perhaps a half dozen times when fracking a well, which again happened to be over a fault, caused an earthquake. Out of the millions of fracked wells that have been drilled. Statistically speaking–fracking doesn’t cause earthquakes–detectable earthquakes, that is. You have to understand something about earthquakes and fracking. From the Standord researchers: “Earthquakes generated by fracking are typically no larger than magnitude 0. That’s equivalent to the amount of energy released when a milk carton hits the floor after falling off a counter.” However, every now and again an earthquake will hit a 1 or even 2 magnitude. Above 2 is barely noticeable by humans. What the Stanford researchers have done is to figure out how to monitor seismicity when fracking (or injecting wastewater into wells), and use that information to predict when the activity may lead to triggering a larger quake. Now that is useful information…
An MDN reader recently asked us, “Hey, what’s up with the Belmont County, OH ethane cracker? We haven’t read anything in a while.” You haven’t read anything on MDN, nor anywhere else, because there’s been nothing to read. PTT Global Chemical, based in Thailand, announced in April 2015 they are interested in building a $5 billion ethane cracker plant complex in Belmont County, OH (see 
Last Thursday the the federal Second Circuit Court of Appeals ruled against the New York Dept. of Environmental Conservation’s (DEC) request to block of construction of Millennium Pipeline’s Valley Lateral Project (see 
In May MDN brought you the news that Noble Energy dropped a bombshell, selling its 100% interest in 385,000 Marcellus/Utica acres and wells producing 415 million cubic feet equivalent of natural gas in West Virginia and Pennsylvania for $1.225 billion to HG Energy (see 
We have a couple of important signs that Dominion and Duke Energy, the main sponsors of the Atlantic Coast Pipeline, are getting ready to begin building the pipeline. Atlantic Coast Pipeline is a $5 billion, 594-mile natural gas pipeline that will stretch from West Virginia through Virginia and into North Carolina. Years after the project filed with the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission (FERC), it was finally approved by FERC in October (see