Empire Pipeline | Energy Companies | Energy Services | NFG Midstream | Pennsylvania | Seneca Resources | Tioga County (PA)
Seneca Resources Going Solo? NFG Board to Decide Spinoff by Oct 15
Yesterday it was a Reuters rumor. This morning it’s official. National Fuel Gas Company (NFG) says its board will decide by October 15 whether to split the 124-year-old company in two. One half would be a brand-new, publicly traded Marcellus/Utica driller made up of Seneca Resources and the NFG Midstream gathering business. The other half, which keeps the National Fuel name, would be a 100% regulated utility and pipeline company. If the board says yes, NFG shareholders would get shares in the new driller, tax-free. Read More “Seneca Resources Going Solo? NFG Board to Decide Spinoff by Oct 15”
It finally happened. Chord Energy, the Bakken-focused driller that inherited a big non-operated slice of the northeast Pennsylvania (NEPA) Marcellus when it bought Enerplus in 2024, has found a buyer. That buyer is POSCO International, the trading and energy arm of South Korean steel giant POSCO. The price is $550 million. MDN first told you in February 2025 that Chord was thinking about selling this asset, and in July 2025 that it was actively shopping it (see links below). The deal covers approximately 32,000 net acres and trailing 12-month (TTM) production of approximately 121 MMcf/d (MMcf/d means million cubic feet per day). The gas is all “residue” gas, meaning dry gas with no NGLs (natural gas liquids like ethane and propane). 
NextEra Energy took its $13 billion, 3,750-megawatt (MW) East Riverside Energy Center to the people on Tuesday night, and the people showed up. Hundreds of Fayette County residents filled Brownsville Area High School for their first look at what would be one of the largest gas-fired power plants in the country. They got poster boards, experts to chat with, and a five-minute slideshow every hour. What they didn’t get was a microphone for questions. We picked up a few new details, including one that producers and pipeline companies should read twice. 
The Upper Burrell Township (Westmoreland County, PA) Planning Commission hit the pause button Tuesday on recommending the township’s latest draft data center ordinance. The delay gives residents time to email their wish lists to supervisors before an Oct. 7 meeting. Supervisors hope to pass the ordinance at a special meeting in October, ahead of the Nov. 2 end of their data center moratorium, and Westmoreland County gets a say, too. The rules won’t touch TECfusions’ existing operations at the former Alcoa/Arconic campus, but they would govern new development there. Buried in the 26-page draft is a line that should make every Marcellus/Utica (M-U) driller and landowner sit up: every new data center must supply its own baseload power. And the township says its next project is writing rules for power plants. 
Four months after pulling the trigger on its $13 billion Commonwealth LNG export plant in Cameron Parish, Louisiana (see 
OTHER U.S. REGIONS: Texas Capital’s TXS and OILT ETFs now trading on the Texas Stock Exchange; NATIONAL: U.S. natural gas futures slip ahead of storage data; Climate activism “made me feel like a good person”; INTERNATIONAL: Oil falls as Saudi supply outlook improves; Wind and solar power is old, uneconomic, and government dependent. 
CNX Resources isn’t going anywhere in north-central West Virginia. At a community event at the Blacksville Volunteer Fire Department social hall, CNX Chief Operating Officer Navneet Behl laid out a drilling calendar for the company’s Wadestown operation in western Monongalia County through 2029. CNX has 24 wells already producing on three pads there, is working on six more wells on those same pads, and is building a brand-new pad slated for 13 more wells. The company says it expects to pay about $525 million in royalties on those 19 new wells. That’s the good news. The not-so-good news came from the same guy: Behl admitted CNX can only drill so much in Appalachia because there still aren’t enough pipelines to haul the gas away. 
It took three years, two conditional use applications, one appellate court loss, a subdivision, a three-hour hearing, and a deadline extension — but EQT finally got its vote. On Monday night (Sept. 14), Elizabeth Township’s (Allegheny County, PA) Board of Commissioners voted unanimously to approve two conditional use permits for EQT’s six-well Heracles project: one for the well pad, and one for the interconnect pad (the spot where gas from the wells hands off to a pipeline). The pad sits less than a half-mile from Elizabeth Forward High School, so the approvals come with a long list of strings attached, including a 10-year “emergency preparedness fund” EQT must pay into. Big Green group Protect Elizabeth Township (PET) says it will keep fighting in court. In a surprise twist, the commission president revealed that someone has approached the township about building a data center. 
Texas is still the undisputed king of American natural gas — but Pennsylvania, West Virginia, and Ohio together produced almost as much gas in 2025 as Texas did all by itself. New EIA data confirms Appalachia is America’s second major shale gas hub, and it’s not particularly close behind. The U.S. Energy Information Administration’s annual gross withdrawals table shows the country produced 47.73 Tcf of natural gas in 2025 (gross withdrawals — the total wellhead volume before processing, as distinct from marketed or dry gas figures). Texas alone accounted for 13,603 Bcf, or 28.5% of the U.S. total — nearly double Pennsylvania’s 7,676 Bcf (16.1%). 
The Ohio Department of Natural Resources (ODNR) recently released second-quarter 2026 production numbers. The state’s top natural gas producer was Ascent Resources, with 220,554,117 Mcf (220.55 Bcf) produced during the quarter, averaging 2.42 Bcf/d. Ascent’s production accounted for 41% of the state’s natural gas production. The top oil producer in the state, by far, was EOG Resources, which reports under two names: EOG Ohio LLC (the old Encino Energy assets EOG bought last year) and EOG Resources Inc. Together, they produced 8,846,396 barrels of oil during the quarter, which works out to an average of 97,213 barrels per day. That’s 67% (two-thirds!) of Ohio’s entire oil production during 2Q26. 
The Ohio River Valley Institute (ORVI), the radical anti-fossil fuel outfit that wants to shut down Appalachian shale, is at it again. Today ORVI senior researcher Sean O’Leary published an op-ed in the Ohio Capital Journal claiming that shale’s importance to Ohio’s economy is “small and shrinking.” He lists seven “facts.” We checked every one of them against the same government data he cites. Some are technically true but badly misleading. At least one is flat wrong — by a factor of a million. Here’s what the data actually says. 
The fall “turn down the valves” season for Marcellus/Utica gas has arrived, and it showed up about a week early. Last Friday (Sept. 11), the spot price at Texas Eastern M-2 (aka Tetco M-2), the key pricing point for gas produced in southwestern Pennsylvania, West Virginia, and Ohio, averaged $1.435 per MMBtu (million British thermal units, roughly 1,000 cubic feet of gas). That’s 6.5 cents below the $1.50 mark that EQT, the region’s biggest driller, has flagged as its trigger for curtailing (temporarily cutting back) production. So, are shut-ins coming? History says probably, at least for a while. 
Yesterday the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) finalized a rule that rips out the heart of the Biden administration’s 2024 power plant carbon regulations. Gone is the requirement that new “base load” natural gas-fired power plants and long-lived coal plants capture 90% of their carbon dioxide (CO2) by 2032. EPA says the repeal will save $310 billion. At the same time, EPA proposed scrapping every remaining greenhouse gas standard for power plants, which it says would save another $370 million. For the Marcellus/Utica, where a parade of big gas-fired power plants is lining up to feed AI data centers, this is very good news. 
Remember Synapse Energy Economics? That’s the Massachusetts consulting outfit that, back in 2023, was paid by two Big Green groups to produce a “report” claiming Pennsylvania’s RGGI carbon tax would lower your electric bill (see