Legislation

With comprehensive tax reform winning passage in the Republican-controlled Senate on Saturday, lawmakers in the House, where the GOP also holds sway, are preparing to hold conference committee talks to iron out differences, including on energy issues, between bills passed in the House and Senate.

It remains unclear if legislation to enact a severance tax on unconventional natural gas production that cleared the Pennsylvania House Finance Committee this week has enough support to pass the Republican-controlled chamber.

The oil and natural gas industry’s ongoing attempt in West Virginia to get some kind of law passed to gather landowners into large tracts for unconventional horizontal drilling will likely have to wait another year as the latest legislation remains stuck in the House Energy Committee with little time left in the regular session.

The West Virginia House Judiciary Committee has rewritten a bill that would have exempted 29,000 oil and natural gas industry storage tanks from a 2014 law aimed at better protecting public water supplies.

Ohio Gov. John Kasich on Tuesday vetoed legislation that would have expanded a sales tax exemption for oil and natural gas producers, saying it would have cost the state too much and unfairly favored the industry.

A bill that would protect Pennsylvania landowners from natural gas drilling post-production costs has again stalled in the General Assembly, which has only days left in this year’s legislative session.

Roughly 150 protesters were at the Pennsylvania Capitol in Harrisburg on Tuesday for a rally urging lawmakers to pass legislation that would make it difficult for oil and gas companies to deduct post-production costs from royalty checks. Lawmakers have tried but failed for years to pass legislation to clarify the state’s Guaranteed Minimum Royalty Act of 1979, which sets forth the minimum payment to landowners but doesn’t address marketing costs and how they should be factored into royalties. Bradford County, PA, has launched a campaign to pressure lawmakers into passing state HB 1391, which may be considered in October (see Shale Daily,Sept. 9). The industry has fought against the legislation, claiming contractual disputes should be settled in court.

One bill is already awaiting the governor’s signature and two others (SB 512 and AB 2903) are still in play to reform the state’s major energy regulatory commission as California’s legislature sprints toward the end of its session at midnight on Wednesday. SB 512 passed the lower house Assembly on Monday and went back to the Senate for concurrence.

A sweeping overhaul of environmental regulations for Pennsylvania’s oil and natural gas industry hit another roadblock on Wednesday, when the state House Environmental and Energy Resources Committee approved legislation to scrap parts of the package that would apply to conventional wells.