Marcellus Drilling News

Antero Resources | Ascent Resources | Beaver County | Belmont County | Bradford County | Butler County | Energy Companies | EOG Resources | Expand Energy | Harrison County | Jay-Bee Oil & Gas | LOLA Energy | Noble County | Ohio | Pennsylvania | Pleasants County | Range Resources Corp | Ritchie County | Seneca Resources | Tioga County (PA) | Tuscarawas County | Weekly Permits | West Virginia

27 New Shale Well Permits Reported for PA-OH-WV Aug 10 – 16
August 21, 2026August 21, 2026

The Marcellus/Utica region received 27 new drilling permits last week, August 10 – 16, up significantly from the 8 permits issued two weeks ago. In something of a reversal, Pennsylvania turned in the fewest new permits, just 4. Ohio issued the most permits, with 16, and West Virginia issued 7 permits. The drillers who received new permits were: Antero Resources (6), Ascent Resources (5), EOG Resources (8), Expand Energy (4), Jay-Bee Oil & Gas (1), LOLA Energy (1), Range Resources (1), and Seneca Resources (1). Read More “27 New Shale Well Permits Reported for PA-OH-WV Aug 10 – 16”
Commodity Price | Industrywide Issues | Lease & Royalty Payments

Why Your Royalty Check May Shrink This Fall: $1.70 Appalachia Gas
August 21, 2026August 21, 2026

Appalachian gas producers look likely to spend this autumn doing exactly what they did last autumn: turning down the taps. Regional storage is fat, in-basin prices are stuck near $1.70, and the January contract is more than double that. For Marcellus and Utica landowners, that math translates into one thing — thinner royalty checks in September, October and November. Read More “Why Your Royalty Check May Shrink This Fall: $1.70 Appalachia Gas”
Carroll County | Electrical Generation | Industrywide Issues | Ohio | Regulation

Ohio OKs First Non-Data-Center Gas Plant Since 2019 in Carroll Co.
August 21, 2026August 21, 2026

Score one for the good guys. The Ohio Power Siting Board (OPSB) voted yesterday (Aug. 20) to hand Chestnut Run Energy LLC its Certificate of Environmental Compatibility and Public Need — the golden ticket needed to build a 1,300-megawatt (MW), $2 billion natural gas-fired power plant in Washington Township, Carroll County. That’s smack in the middle of Utica Shale country. MDN first told you about this project back in April (see Chestnut Run Energy to Build 1.3 GW Power Plant in Carroll County). Now it’s official. Read More “Ohio OKs First Non-Data-Center Gas Plant Since 2019 in Carroll Co.”
DeepRock Disposal | Energy Services | Industrywide Issues | Ohio | Washington County (OH) | Wastewater

Columbus Dispatch Takes Another Swing at Marietta Injection Wells
August 21, 2026August 21, 2026

The Columbus Dispatch — a paper based 120 miles northwest of the action — parachuted into Marietta, Ohio, yesterday with a long story about shale wastewater injection wells that leads with the words “radioactive,” “toxic,” and “Russian roulette,” and waits ten paragraphs to tell readers the one fact that matters most: no evidence of drinking water contamination has turned up. Not now. Not in 15 years. We’ve covered this fight since 2025, and we’ll say again what we said in July — there IS a real problem here, but it isn’t the one the Dispatch is selling. Read More “Columbus Dispatch Takes Another Swing at Marietta Injection Wells”
Industrywide Issues | Pipelines | Research

New England Grid Study Is a Giant Ad for More M-U Gas Pipelines
August 21, 2026August 21, 2026

New England has spent 25 years and untold billions “transitioning” its electric grid—and has almost nothing to show for it, at least by the one measure the greenies claim to care about. A new white paper from the Fiscal Alliance Foundation, released Aug. 20, finds fossil fuels generated 55.4% of the electricity produced inside New England in 2025 — slightly more than the 54.6% share back in 2000. Read that again. A quarter-century of mandates, subsidies, and virtue-signaling, and the fossil share went up. Read More “New England Grid Study Is a Giant Ad for More M-U Gas Pipelines”
Industrywide Issues | Pipelines | Virginia

Va. County Produces Gas But Can’t Buy a Molecule of It
August 21, 2026August 21, 2026

Tazewell County, Va.

Tazewell County, Virginia, is the third-largest natural gas-producing county in the state. A major interstate pipeline carrying Appalachian gas — including molecules out of Pennsylvania and West Virginia — runs straight through it. And almost nobody who lives or works there can buy a single Mcf of it. That may finally be changing, one slow step at a time. Read More “Va. County Produces Gas But Can’t Buy a Molecule of It”
Best of the Rest

MDN’s Energy Stories of Interest: Fri, Aug 21, 2026
August 21, 2026August 21, 2026

OTHER U.S. REGIONS: In NH, Energy Sec. says clean energy costly, backs gas pipeline; NATIONAL: U.S. natural gas futures settle lower; A Supreme Court case may be slowing Trump’s next climate rollback; No, MIT, ‘clean energy’ isn’t the future — nor is it actually clean; The data center backlash has a practical fix; EIA natural gas storage build misses expectations; INTERNATIONAL: Iran tensions push oil near $94; The inhumanity of net zero; Is the IPCC reliable?; EU not concerned about gas supply or storage filling. Read More “MDN’s Energy Stories of Interest: Fri, Aug 21, 2026”
AI | Electrical Generation | Industrywide Issues | Pennsylvania | Regulation | West Virginia

WV Rolls Out Data Center Welcome Mat as PA Slams the Door
August 20, 2026August 20, 2026

Yesterday we told you how PA Gov. Josh Shapiro’s Executive Order 2026-05 handed every township supervisor a kill switch and wrote natural gas out of the “clean firm energy” column (see Shapiro EO Slams Brakes on PA Data Centers, Gas Plants Too). Now look two states south. On Aug. 11, WV Gov. Pat Morrisey stood at a Charleston podium reading “STANDING ON PRINCIPLES,” flanked by Senate President Randy Smith and House Speaker Roger Hanshaw, and rolled out the West Virginia Responsible Data Center Development Plan — a 20-year framework built to attract hyperscale data centers, not repel them. Same gas underneath. Opposite answers. Read More “WV Rolls Out Data Center Welcome Mat as PA Slams the Door”
Energy Companies | Epsilon Energy | Expand Energy | Industrywide Issues | Pennsylvania | Pipelines | Susquehanna County

Epsilon Mulls Auburn Expansion, Sees 200 Bcf Left in Susquehanna
August 20, 2026August 20, 2026

Epsilon Energy (NASDAQ: EPSN) keeps calling its Susquehanna County, PA, acreage a “legacy” asset — and then keeps telling investors it’s sitting on up to 200 billion cubic feet of gas it hasn’t produced yet. At the EnerCom Denver energy investment conference on Tuesday, Epsilon’s VP of Finance put hard numbers on the northeast Pennsylvania position for the first time, disclosed pad-level economics that are rare to see in public, and dropped the news item that matters most to anyone with a lease inside the Auburn dedication: the company is reviewing an expansion of the Auburn Gas Gathering System to handle drilling coming in 2028 and beyond. Read More “Epsilon Mulls Auburn Expansion, Sees 200 Bcf Left in Susquehanna”
Antero Resources | CNX Resources | Commodity Price | Energy Companies | EQT Corp | Industrywide Issues | Range Resources Corp

WhiteHawk Sees $30B of Landowner Minerals Left to Buy in M-U
August 20, 2026August 20, 2026

Six days after WhiteHawk Minerals (NYSE: WHK) filed its first quarterly report as a public company, CEO Daniel Herz took the stage at EnerCom Denver and did something CEOs usually avoid: he put a dated natural gas price forecast on the record. He thinks $4 gas is the number that unlocks the next wave of supply, he doesn’t think the Haynesville gets where people expect, and he thinks the back half of this decade is going to be a roller coaster. Read More “WhiteHawk Sees $30B of Landowner Minerals Left to Buy in M-U”
Allegheny County | Energy Companies | EQT Corp | Industrywide Issues | Pennsylvania | Regulation

EQT Gives Up an Automatic Win in Elizabeth Twp Permit Fight
August 20, 2026August 20, 2026

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Elizabeth Township’s (Allegheny County, PA) Board of Commissioners was supposed to vote by August 21 on EQT’s conditional use permit for the six-well Heracles pad near Elizabeth Forward High School. Instead, at an August 17 workshop meeting, commissioners announced they’d cut a deal with EQT to push the decision into September — saying they need more time. Here’s the part the news coverage skipped: under Pennsylvania’s Municipalities Planning Code, blowing that 45-day deadline would have handed EQT an automatic, deemed approval. The clock was running in EQT’s favor. EQT gave it up voluntarily. That’s not a company scrambling for cover — that’s a company building a record it expects to defend on appeal. Read More “EQT Gives Up an Automatic Win in Elizabeth Twp Permit Fight”
Columbia County | Energy Services | Industrywide Issues | Litigation | Pennsylvania | Transco | Williams | Wyoming County (PA)

Williams Wins Right to Sell PA Solar Credits from Compressor Arrays
August 20, 2026August 20, 2026

In a case the judges themselves called one of first impression, Pennsylvania’s Commonwealth Court just handed one of the country’s biggest natural gas pipeline companies the right to earn — and sell — Pennsylvania solar energy credits. Williams wants to put two 11-megawatt (MW) solar arrays next to a pair of Transco compressor stations in Wyoming and Columbia counties. The panels won’t touch the electric grid. They’ll simply feed the compressor stations and shrink Williams’ power bill. The Public Utility Commission said twice that meant no solar credits. On August 19, the court said the PUC was wrong. Read More “Williams Wins Right to Sell PA Solar Credits from Compressor Arrays”
Carbon Capture | Energy Companies | Industrywide Issues | Questerre Energy

Questerre Wins Quebec OK for Carbon Storage Pilot on Utica Acreage
August 20, 2026August 20, 2026

Utica Shale in Quebec (click for larger version)

Quebec has approved Questerre Energy’s application to run a carbon storage pilot on its Utica Shale acreage near Bécancour — but don’t mistake this for Quebec lifting its ban on Utica gas drilling. The Ministry of Economy, Innovation and Energy approved the five-year pilot (extendable two more years) on August 19, letting Questerre drill injection and observation wells — including one existing well — to test the subsurface for long-term CO2 storage. CEO Michael Binnion is using the approval to push two bigger arguments: that Questerre’s pre-existing exploration rights survived Bill 21, the 2022 law that outlawed oil and gas production province-wide, and that gas and carbon storage should be developed together as Quebec’s “made in Quebec” answer to emissions and energy security. Buried in the release: Quebec has also given Questerre a decommissioning notice for its 12 suspended wells, due within 36 months — a deadline the company is now contesting using a separate bill that allows old wells to be repurposed for carbon storage. Read More “Questerre Wins Quebec OK for Carbon Storage Pilot on Utica Acreage”
Best of the Rest

MDN’s Energy Stories of Interest: Thu, Aug 20, 2026
August 20, 2026August 20, 2026

NATIONAL: Natural gas futures sustain upward climb as heat endures; Psychedelics for Climate Action (12,000 cultists); R Street is wrong on climate; Who’s paying for climate reporting in the mainstream media?; INTERNATIONAL: Oil gains as refinery demand surges; Oil market starts pricing in a prolonged Hormuz crisis; Washington lit the fuse for Africa’s energy explosion. Read More “MDN’s Energy Stories of Interest: Thu, Aug 20, 2026”
Antero Resources | Ascent Resources | Devon Energy | Energy Companies | EOG Resources | EQT Corp | Expand Energy | Industrywide Issues | Research

Utica Rig Count Fell 42%. Utica Drilling Didn’t. Here’s Why.
August 19, 2026August 19, 2026

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Enverus, the Austin-based energy data outfit, rolled out its Top U.S. Drillers of 2026 rankings yesterday (Aug. 18). Here’s the headline nobody else will write: two of the three biggest land drilling customers in America now own Appalachian acreage. EOG Resources ranks No. 2 and Devon Energy ranks No. 3, and between them they hold the largest Utica position and the best Marcellus rock in the basin. Dig deeper, and you’ll find something that ought to calm a few nerves — the Enverus data shows Utica rigs down 42% in a year, and that number does not mean what it looks like it means. Read More “Utica Rig Count Fell 42%. Utica Drilling Didn’t. Here’s Why.”
AI | Electrical Generation | Industrywide Issues | Pennsylvania | Regulation

Shapiro EO Slams Brakes on PA Data Centers, Gas Plants Too
August 19, 2026August 19, 2026

Gov. Josh Shapiro signed Executive Order 2026-05 on Tuesday, imposing what he called “the strictest guardrails in the nation” on AI data centers — and, we’d argue, on the gas-fired power plants that will run them. Two western PA projects lost fast-track permitting status the same day. But the real damage is buried in a 33-page model consent order that got almost no attention. We don’t think it’s unfair or hyperbole to say Shapiro just destroyed the AI data center industry in the Keystone State. Read More “Shapiro EO Slams Brakes on PA Data Centers, Gas Plants Too”