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Revenue raised through a proposed impact fee that would cost Marcellus Shale drillers a minimum $10,000 per well annually is needed to help close a project $4.2 billion budget gap in Pennsylvania, according to state Senate President Pro Tempore Joe Scarnati (R-Jefferson).

Two multi-state organizations, with the help of oil and gas companies, are preparing to launch a website Monday (April 11) that will provide the public with a comprehensive list of chemicals used in hydraulic fracturing. The website, fracfocus.org, is being developed by the Ground Water Protection Council (GWPC) and the Interstate Oil and Gas Compact Commission. “This is pretty unique,” GWPC spokesman Mike Nickolaus told NGI. “Some of the oil and gas companies have done some of this on their own in the past, and the service companies have something too, but it’s not at all like this. This will be the only multi-state, multi-operator registry of this sort.” Once the website is online, the public would be able to search for wells by state, county or their American Petroleum Institute number. Twenty companies, both producers and service companies, already have registered and agreed to voluntarily upload data about their operations.

With the first meeting of his recently formed Marcellus Shale Advisory Commission set for Friday, Pennsylvania Gov. Tom Corbett remains firmly opposed to a state-imposed severance tax on the natural gas industry, but is open to the idea of local impact fees. And those fees can’t be considered until the local impact of drilling is quantified, a Corbett spokesman told NGI’s Shale Daily Thursday.

The Maryland House of Delegates has approved a bill that would freeze the permitting of Marcellus Shale drilling until 2013 while state agencies review the results of various studies into Marcellus development and hydraulic fracturing (hydrofracking), including a major study being performed by the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (see Shale Daily, Feb. 24).

A significant majority of Pennsylvania residents support the use of a severance tax on drilling operations to help close a projected $4 billion state budget gap, according to the results of a survey released Thursday by the Center for Opinion Research at Franklin & Marshall College in Lancaster, PA.

A significant majority of Pennsylvania residents support the use of a severance tax on drilling operations to help close a projected $4 billion state budget gap, according to the results of a survey released Thursday by the Center for Opinion Research at Franklin & Marshall College in Lancaster, PA.

A subsidiary of Houston’s Apache Corp. is the newest member of the Marine Well Containment Co. (MWCC), which was formed last year by Big Oil producers to help respond to well control incidents in the deepwater Gulf of Mexico (GOM).

With some help from a 13.3-cent gain Friday in the prompt-month debut by April futures and colder forecasts for most territory east of the Mississippi River, prices firmed at nearly all points Monday. The restoration of industrial load following its usual weekend decline also contributed to the overall advance.

Despite reporting a $16.3 million net loss for 2010, Magnum Hunter Resources Corp. believes that recent and pending acquisitions could help the company more than triple production, allowing it to compete with bigger companies in three major shale plays.