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16 New Shale Well Permits Reported for PA-OH-WV Sep 7 – 13
The Marcellus/Utica region received 16 new drilling permits last week, September 7 – 13, down from the 28 permits issued two weeks ago. Pennsylvania issued 13 of the new permits. Ohio issued 3 new permits. And West Virginia issued no new permits. The drillers who received new permits last week were: CNX Resources, EOG Resources, EQT, Infinity Natural Resources, and Range Resources. Read More “16 New Shale Well Permits Reported for PA-OH-WV Sep 7 – 13”
It’s a sellout, and we now have the full scorecard. On Tuesday, the Bureau of Land Management (BLM) auctioned drilling rights to 40 parcels of federal minerals under Ohio’s Wayne National Forest (WNF), and every parcel found a buyer. The 2,776.84 acres in Monroe and Washington counties brought $11,097,693 in total receipts. Five companies won leases, and one of them, Apex Energy Operating III LLC, walked off with nearly two-thirds of the acreage. We have BLM’s full parcel-by-parcel results, embedded below. It’s the first federal lease sale in the WNF since March 2017. 
DeepRock Disposal Solutions wants two of its Noble County, Ohio, injection wells back in service — and the Ohio Department of Natural Resources (ODNR) keeps saying no. ODNR’s Division of Oil and Gas Resources Management shut the Travis and Warren wells in January 2023, blaming them for a 2021 brine eruption that cost the state $1.28 million to clean up. DeepRock argued its case at a hearing in April. It lost. The division chief issued a fresh order on July 31 continuing the suspension, and on Aug. 28 DeepRock appealed to the Ohio Oil and Gas Commission. Here’s the part our readers should circle on the calendar: under Ohio Administrative Code, DeepRock has 120 days from that July 31 order — until roughly Nov. 28 (our count) — to submit a plan fixing what the division found, or plug both wells permanently. 
Precision Drilling, the Calgary-based rig contractor that says it’s the #2 drilling company-for-hire in the Marcellus, announced on Sept. 16 that it will keep buying back its own stock for another year. Yawn, right? Stick with us. The buyback is the boring part. The interesting part is the investor presentation Precision put out this month, which lays out why the company thinks gas drilling for LNG exports will keep its rigs busy for years, and why the price of renting a rig is heading up. 
Shale Insight 2026
OTHER U.S. REGIONS: WA high court tosses natural gas measure approved by voters; NATIONAL: U.S. natural gas futures inch down in choppy trade; Data center sites powered by gas isn’t the same as ready to build; INTERNATIONAL: Oil falls as Mideast flows improve; LNG prices could jump further as Hormuz supply crunch persists; China hits back as US Congress approves tariffs on top buyers of Russian energy. 
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. 
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 
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.