Anti-Drilling/Fossil Fuel | Buckeye Brine | Coshocton County | Energy Services | Industrywide Issues | Ohio | Wastewater
Rolling Stone Drops Ohio Brine Hit Piece 4 Days Before Election
Four days before Ohioans pick their next governor, Rolling Stone and the climate activist website DeSmog published a story by anti-fossil writer Justin Nobel under the headline “Ohio Denies Evidence of Fracking Waste in Drinking Water. Its Own Records Show Otherwise.” We read every word. The state’s records show no such thing. What they show is one salty water well in Coshocton County that the Ohio Department of Natural Resources (ODNR) investigated in 2021 and traced to a naturally salty layer of rock. Much of the rest is opinion from activists and a water well driller, plus a candidate’s campaign promise. Here’s what the story gets wrong, and what it leaves out. Read More “Rolling Stone Drops Ohio Brine Hit Piece 4 Days Before Election”
It’s a rerun of last spring, only bigger. A dry autumn has left many small streams in Pennsylvania’s Northern Tier running low, and the Susquehanna River Basin Commission (SRBC) has told shale drillers and their water suppliers to stop withdrawing water at 48 locations. Another 12 shale water sources are on the SRBC’s “watch” list, meaning they’re close to being shut off too. In April we reported 15 shutoffs and 9 watch sites (see 
The Pennsylvania Department of Environmental Protection (DEP) says it plans to approve the air permit for Aligned Data Centers’ giant “Project Phoenix” campus at the former Bruce Mansfield coal plant site in Shippingport (Beaver County, PA). The campus will run on Marcellus/Utica natural gas, but it won’t burn the gas. Aligned plans to make its own electricity with solid oxide fuel cells, which turn gas into power through a chemical reaction instead of combustion. DEP published its notice in Saturday’s Pennsylvania Bulletin and scheduled a public hearing for Thursday, December 3, in Shippingport. Get the popcorn ready. 
Nine weeks. Still 33. The Marcellus/Utica held at 33 rigs for the week ended October 30, and the national count held at 603 for a fourth straight week. Underneath that flat national total, oil rigs added two and gas rigs lost two. Frac spreads slipped by three, a third straight weekly drop. On the price board, WTI closed out October above $104 a barrel, and natural gas, now trading on the December contract, settled at about $2.90 per MMBtu. Every one of our 33 rigs is still parked in the same county it was in five weeks ago. Plus: Expand Energy grabs the top spot on the Enverus permit list again, Range Resources doubles its permits in the same week EQT agreed to buy it, and CNX returns to the rig list. 
Antero Midstream (AM), the pipeline and water company that serves Antero Resources, finally got paid. In 3Q26, AM collected about $377 million from Veolia Water Technologies, ending a six-year court fight over the failed Clearwater wastewater plant. AM used the money to cut its debt by more than $400 million and pay off its 2028 notes early. The legal win more than tripled 3Q net income. But AM’s day-to-day business barely grew from 2Q, because Antero Resources shut in gas to avoid selling it at bargain-basement prices. AM says 4Q will be a record anyway, and it’s lining up “several billion dollars in potential projects,” including a brand-new North-South pipeline to Clarington, Ohio (see 
Enterprise Products Partners (EPD), the Houston midstream giant that owns ATEX, the 1,230-mile pipeline carrying Marcellus/Utica ethane to Mont Belvieu, TX, reported a blowout third quarter on Thursday. But the part of the earnings call that matters most to M-U drillers and landowners came during Q&A. An analyst asked whether the pending EQT-Range combination changes the math on ATEX recontracting. Enterprise’s answer: not really, but the next round of contracts will be priced for “today’s market.” Translation: the rate reset we told you about in August is still coming. 
It’s official. Venture Global (VG) says Phase 1 of its Plaquemines LNG export plant in Louisiana began “commercial operations” on October 31. That means the customers who signed 20-year contracts back in 2022 are finally getting the LNG they agreed to buy. It took 22 months of “commissioning” to get here, and in that time VG sold roughly 530 cargoes on its own account, many at spot-market prices. And yes, Marcellus/Utica gas helped fill a lot of those ships. 
DT Midstream (DTM), the Detroit-based midstream company that gathers Marcellus/Utica gas in northeastern and southwestern Pennsylvania, West Virginia, and Ohio, released its third-quarter 2026 update on Thursday. The headline for our neck of the woods: Northeast gathering volumes slipped about 9% from the second quarter, to 1.25 Bcf/d (billion cubic feet per day), and DTM says they’ll drop again in the fourth quarter because drillers are curtailing (holding back) production while prices are weak. The longer-term picture is much brighter. DTM is taking bids on another expansion of Millennium Pipeline into the New York market, signing 20-year deals to move Appalachian gas to Indiana power plants, and talking about a bigger NEXUS Pipeline down the road. 
Millennium Pipeline, the pipe that carries northeast Marcellus gas across New York’s Southern Tier, is taking bids on a new expansion called the Ramapo Enhancement Project (REP). The binding open season runs through Nov. 13. Millennium is offering up to 60,000 dekatherms per day (Dth/d) of new firm capacity, roughly 58 MMcf/d (million cubic feet per day). The gas would move from the Stagecoach storage hub on the PA-NY border to the Algonquin pipeline at Ramapo, NY, which serves the New York City area and New England. Service would start Nov. 1, 2028. It’s a modest project, but it’s a new pipeline expansion into New York. Pinch us. 
NATIONAL: U.S. natural gas futures fall on mild weather outlook; Climate plaintiffs firm writes $25,000 check to Democratic AGs weeks before election; Trump administration may restart closed refineries; An environmentalist’s case for permitting reform; Shunning AI data centers will cost the US far more than embracing them; Energy security is beating energy ideology; AI’s biggest water problem isn’t the data center. It’s the power plant; How the US midterm elections could impact chemistry and other sciences; INTERNATIONAL: Oil creeps higher amid uncertainty over USA strategy in Iran; Another billion-dollar industry arrives to feed off “the climate crisis”; Qatari gas tanker struck in Gulf on Friday evening, state media says; Pakistan LNG cargo attacked near Hormuz had Iranian approval. 
The Marcellus/Utica region received 9 new shale well permits last week, Oct. 19 – 25, down 3 from 12 the week before. Pennsylvania issued 4 new permits, Ohio issued 4, and West Virginia issued 1. The drillers who received new-well permits last week were: Antero Resources, Gulfport, INR, JKLM Energy, and Snyder Brothers. It was a quieter week on the new-permit front. The busiest driller of all, EOG Resources, didn’t get a single permit for a brand-new well — but it did get seven permits to tweak wells it was already approved to drill in Ohio (more on that below). 
Antero Resources, the biggest driller in West Virginia, pumped out a company-record 4.234 Bcfe/d (billion cubic feet equivalent per day) in 3Q26. That’s up 23% from a year ago. And Antero did it while shutting in more than 100 MMcfe/d of dry gas on purpose, because local prices got so bad that on some weekends in September and October, gas went for 60 to 65 cents. Antero plans to shut in even more gas in 4Q, so it lowered its 4Q forecast to 4.3 Bcfe/d. Back in July, it promised 4.4 to 4.5 Bcfe/d. The good news? Antero says prices for its natural gas liquids (NGLs), meaning propane, butane, and their cousins, have jumped about 50% since 3Q ended. And Antero hedges almost none of its NGLs, so it keeps nearly all of that gain. 
CNX Resources released its third-quarter 2026 update yesterday, and the short version goes like this: production dipped a bit, in-basin gas prices were ugly (below $1 at times), but CNX’s big hedge book kept the cash flowing. The company posted its 27th straight quarter of free cash flow, raised its full-year cash forecast, and kept spending most of that cash buying back its own stock. CEO Alan Shepard says CNX will stay in “maintenance mode” heading into 2027—but he also delivered a line we’ll be quoting for a while: “every drop here in Appalachia is going to get developed.” Here’s what’s in the numbers for landowners, competitors, the supply chain, and investors. 
Shell CEO Wael Sawan had warm words yesterday for the company’s Beaver County ethane cracker plant, calling it “the 800-pound asset” in Shell’s chemicals business and saying it has been performing very, very well. Then, in the same breath, he repeated what he’s been saying for more than a year: Shell is not the “natural owner” of chemical assets, and it is in “deep discussions” to sell or partner them, with news expected in the coming months. Sawan’s comments came during Shell’s third-quarter 2026 earnings call. There’s one new wrinkle. If Shell can’t get the price it wants, the more likely outcome may be folding its chemicals business into someone else’s and keeping a minority stake, rather than selling outright. We read through the call transcript and Shell’s 3Q documents to see what they tell us about Monaca and the chemicals division. 
Spain’s Repsol, which picked up a big chunk of PA’s northern tier Marcellus when it bought Talisman Energy in 2015, released its third-quarter 2026 update yesterday. We read all four documents: the press release, the 37-page results report, the investor slide deck, and the earnings call transcript. The Marcellus gets exactly one sentence. But it’s a good sentence: more gas is flowing from Repsol’s Marcellus wells. The call also included a few comments from CEO Josu Jon Imaz that Repsol landowners, competing drillers, service companies, and investors will want to hear.