Jamison Cocklin

With more than 1,000 horizontal shale well permits issued to date in West Virginia, and with only about 5% of unconventional oil and gas reserves under development there, state regulators are confronting a pile of paperwork that has created a backlog of pending permit applications and slowed production in some instances.

Recently released disclosures from the Pennsylvania Emergency Management Agency (PEMA) show dozens of trains carry millions of gallons of mostly Bakken and Canadian crude oil through the state each week toward refineries on the East Coast. PEMA was ordered to release the documents by the Pennsylvania Office of Open Records after it found the information included in them was not confidential or proprietary (see Shale Daily,Oct. 6). The state’s leading rail companies, Norfolk Southern Railway Co. and CSX Transportation Inc., run a combined total of up to 75 crude trains through Pennsylvania each week, which comes as no surprise given the visibility of the marked tanker cars running through cities such as Pittsburgh as they enter the western part of the state heading east. The reports show that the trains carry a minimum of one million gallons of crude oil each.

WPX Energy Inc. has appealed all three of the Pennsylvania Department of Environmental Protection’s (DEP) orders to permanently replace the water supplies of families that were impacted by problems at the company’s impoundment in Westmoreland County in 2012.

Dominion Resources Inc. announced terms earlier this week for its midstream master limited partnership (MLP), which would own the Cove Point liquefied natural gas (LNG) terminal in Maryland. Dominion said it expects to raise more than $400 million in an initial public offering (IPO).

The four-well Stewart Winland pad, operated by Magnum Hunter Resources Corp. and home to the best Utica Shale well yet tested in West Virginia, remains shut in nearly a month after it first flowed at a peak rate of 46.5 MMcf/d in a symbol of some of the broader challenges facing operators in the Appalachian Basin.

Marcellus heavyweight EQT Corp., one of Pennsylvania’s leading producers, is in a showdown with the state Department of Environmental Protection (DEP) over a 2012 impoundment leak that finds it facing a $4.53 million fine and six separate criminal charges in Commonwealth Court.

Operations at Antero Resources Corp.’s Primm Pad in Doddridge County, WV, remain at a standstill after the company inadvertently breached a producing well while drilling another there two weeks ago.

The Pennsylvania Emergency Management Agency (PEMA) has been ordered to release detailed information about crude oil rail shipments throughout the state from North Dakota’s Bakken Shale after three news media organization’s requested the disclosures over the summer.

Pennsylvania Department of Environmental Protection (DEP) Secretary Christopher Abruzzo, along with the agency’s top attorney, resigned on Thursday following a rapidly unfolding scandal involving sexually explicit emails that were exchanged among dozens of former and current staffers in the state attorney general’s office.