Manchin Tells Pittsburgh Crowd He Wrote the IRA in Secret
Former U.S. Senator Joe Manchin (D/I-WV) closed out THE SUMMIT: Appalachia in Pittsburgh on July 28 with something you don’t often get from a retired politician — a confession. Speaking aboard the Gateway Clipper riverboat to a room full of producers, midstreamers, bankers and landmen, Manchin ditched his prepared remarks entirely (“I can’t give a speech. I can talk.”) and walked the crowd through how the Inflation Reduction Act (IRA) really got written, why he regrets the name, why he thinks the hyperscalers spent two years chasing a “facade,” and what it will actually take to get permitting reform across the finish line. MDN was an advertising partner for the event and obtained the transcripts with the organizer’s permission. This is the first of four articles chronicling the event. Check back each day this week as we publish the rest of the series, including a post tomorrow about EQT correcting the record. Read More “Manchin Tells Pittsburgh Crowd He Wrote the IRA in Secret”
The Ohio Department of Natural Resources (ODNR) will ask the state Controlling Board on Monday, August 17, for authority to spend $105 million of oil and gas lease money on Ohio’s wildlife areas — construction, renovation and grants, on a budget line that currently has zero dollars appropriated for the year. It’s the biggest single deployment of shale money since Ohio started leasing public land, and it’s a good moment to revisit what the opposition told Ohioans would happen instead. 
Here we go again. The Bureau of Land Management (BLM) finally issued three permits to drill on Wayne National Forest (WNF) land in Monroe County, Ohio, back in May — the first new drilling permits in Ohio’s only national forest in years. Predictably, the same coalition of green groups that has kept a lid on WNF for the better part of two decades ran straight back to federal court to try to stop them. 
A federal magistrate judge has excluded six people (well, five leases covering six people and one municipal authority) from the 2,300-plus-member class suing XTO Energy over royalty underpayments in Butler County — not because XTO won a big legal fight, but because both sides agreed these particular leases require arbitration, not a courtroom. This is the latest chapter in Kriley v. XTO Energy Inc., the six-year-old Butler County royalty case MDN has followed since February (see 
Rochester, NY-based Energy Concepts has unveiled a modular natural gas power system called “Plato5X” that lets AI data centers generate their own electricity, make their own water, cool themselves, and capture 90% of their carbon emissions — without touching the local power grid or municipal water supply. Each 5-megawatt module runs on natural gas and is aimed squarely at the exploding AI/data center market, which is straining power grids and water systems across the country (
The last 18 months have been about as good as it gets for anyone who moves Marcellus and Utica molecules. President Trump’s Executive Order 14154 killed the Biden LNG export pause on day one. FERC rewrote its environmental review procedures in June 2025 to speed things up. And FERC finally drove a stake through Order No. 871, the Biden-era rule that let Big Green freeze construction on an approved pipeline just by filing an appeal (see 
Last week, the Pennsylvania Marcellus lost one rig, now down to 16 active rigs after running 17 rigs for 12 weeks in a row. Bummer. Ohio lost a rig two weeks ago and didn’t pick it back up last week, remaining at 10 active rigs for the second week. And West Virginia picked up Ohio’s lost rig two weeks ago, boosting its number to 9 active rigs, maintaining that number last week. All told, the M-U operated 35 rigs last week, which is 21 fewer than our biggest rival (for money and attention), the Haynesville, which operated 56 rigs last week. 
MARCELLUS/UTICA REGION: DEP OKs Expand’s 3rd 16″ water pipeline in Bradford County, PA; Marcellus Shale Coalition president assesses state of gas industry; NATIONAL: U.S. natural gas futures extend losses to seven weeks; Battery storage capacity averaged 70% growth over the last three years; The activist playbook is to use litigation to slow America’s energy infrastructure; 2026 data center rejections hit 275; How U.S. natural gas came back from the dead; INTERNATIONAL: Oil steadies as Hormuz tensions flare; Iran says deal on Strait of Hormuz is close but not enough to open the waterway; Adnoc buys $1.3B of tankers as oil exports boom; EU softens Russian LNG sanctions, allowing shipping and trading to continue beyond 2027. 
The Marcellus/Utica region received (as near as we can tell) 15 new drilling permits last week, July 27 – August 2, down 4 from two weeks ago. The reason for our hesitation is that the Ohio Department of Natural Resources didn’t issue a report for last week. They sometimes are tardy in their report filing, catching it up in the next week’s report. The drillers who received new permits included: Seneca Resources (6), Expand Energy (6), JKLM Energy (2), and Jay-Bee Oil & Gas (1). 
Ascent Resources — one of the largest privately held oil and gas producers in the U.S. and the biggest gas driller in Ohio’s Utica Shale — issued its second quarter 2026 results on Wednesday. Ascent flowed 2,194 MMcfe/d (2.19 Bcfe/d) and booked a $303 million profit. But the real story for MDN readers isn’t the profit line. It’s what Ascent did with its checkbook: a leasing spree that nearly quadrupled land spending year over year, and a July deal that hands back a quarter-Bcf/d of long-haul pipeline space. 
Diversified Energy — the outfit that almost certainly owns more oil and gas wells than any other company in America — reported second quarter 2026 results on Aug. 5, and the big news is that after 25 years of buying up other people’s wells, Diversified is finally going to drill some of its own. Just not here in the Marcellus/Utica. 
MPLX LP — the Findlay, Ohio midstream giant that bought MarkWest back in 2015 and, in doing so, became the biggest gas processor in the Marcellus/Utica — posted second quarter 2026 results on Aug. 4. Buried in the usual pile of EBITDA-speak is a set of numbers M-U landowners and drillers should care about: MPLX’s Marcellus processing plants ran at 96% of capacity, its Utica gathering systems moved 18% more gas than a year ago, and a brand-new 300 MMcf/d processing plant is starting up in southwest Pennsylvania this month. Full disclosure up front: MPLX is not building all this steel because it likes the scenery. It’s building it because Appalachian producers are drilling again. 
Energy Transfer (ET), the Dallas-based pipeline behemoth that owns the Mariner East pipeline system, the Marcus Hook NGL terminal near Philadelphia, and a 32.6% stake in the Rover Pipeline, issued its second quarter 2026 update on Tuesday — and it was a monster. Adjusted EBITDA hit $5.07 billion, up 31% from 2Q25’s $3.87 billion. Distributable cash flow attributable to partners came in at $2.59 billion, up 32%. Net income attributable to partners more than doubled, hitting $2.09 billion versus $1.16 billion a year ago. ET raised its full-year 2026 EBITDA guidance to $18.8–$19.1 billion, up half a billion dollars at the midpoint from what the company told investors just three months ago. ET is a sprawling company with assets in 44 states, so let’s do what we always do — strip out the Permian noise and get to what matters for the Marcellus/Utica. 
Duke Energy reported second quarter 2026 results Tuesday, and while the earnings themselves are fine-but-boring utility fare, buried in the slide deck is one of the better demand stories going for Marcellus/Utica producers: Duke now has 6,025 megawatts (MW) of new gas-fired generation sited in North and South Carolina, every announced plant has its gas supply under contract, and the two pipelines that will carry most of those molecules south both trace back to Appalachia. 
New York’s Department of Environmental Conservation (DEC) and New York State Energy Research and Development Authority (NYSERDA) announced Wednesday they’ve formally adopted regulations tightening the Regional Greenhouse Gas Initiative (RGGI) — the multi-state carbon tax on coal- and gas-fired power plants — through 2037. The agencies used the words “affordable” or “affordability” six times in their joint announcement. Here’s what they didn’t mention: the price of an RGGI permit jumped 40% in one quarter this year, from $24.99 per ton in March to $35.00 in June. And New York households now pay the third-highest electricity prices in America, behind only Hawaii and California (according to federal data). Six mentions of affordability, zero mentions of the auction price. Funny how that works.