8 New Shale Well Permits Issued for PA-OH-WV Apr 1 – 7
The new permits report for two weeks ago showed just four new permits, which we called “below dismal” (see 4 New Shale Well Permits Issued for PA-OH-WV Mar 25 – 31). Last week, for April 1 – 7, there were eight new permits issued. However, they were all issued in Pennsylvania. Both Ohio and West Virginia failed to issue any new permits last week. Coterra Energy scored the most new permits last week with three, all of them for Susquehanna County, PA. CNX Resources received two new permits, both in Westmoreland County. Range Resources also received two permits, one in Allegheny County, the other in Washington County. And Repsol received one new permit for Tioga County.
Read More “8 New Shale Well Permits Issued for PA-OH-WV Apr 1 – 7”

We think our headline about says it all. We’ve seen this type of thing many times before — out-of-town (actually, out-of-state) “protesters” show up and disrupt legal construction activity because, well, because they’re looney tunes. They’ve drunk the global warming Kool-Aid and are convinced, against all reason and rationality, that using natural gas and oil is going to destroy Mom Earth. This time around, it was a married couple well past their prime, a couple of old hippies making silly asses of themselves. They sat inside a huge plywood structure made to look like an opposum, blocking access to a Mountain Valley Pipeline (MVP) construction site in Virginia for several hours.
Last November, CNX Resources CEO Nick DeIuliis signed a voluntary deal with Pennsylvania Gov. Josh Shapiro to expand drilling setbacks and several other regulatory steps not mandated for shale drillers under PA law (see
The Ohio Department of Natural Resources (ODNR), Division of Oil and Gas Resources Management, has hired environmental company Verdantas LLC to fly drones over Bowling Green (Wood County), OH, to try and identify any hidden orphaned and abandoned oil and gas wells. Residents of Bowling Green received a letter from ODNR alerting them to the upcoming drone flights.
Here’s a story that caught our attention. Empire Energy, which drills for oil and gas in Australia’s Beetaloo/McArthur basin, owns producing oil and gas assets in New York State and Pennsylvania, which cover more than 270,000 net acres. Empire’s U.S. assets have output totaling some 4.5 million cubic feet per day (MMcf/d) of gas plus small amounts of associated liquids from approximately 2,400 conventional wells. Empire is selling their U.S. assets for $9.1 million to a privately owned conventional producer — PPP Future Development. The intriguing part of this story is that Empire also owns drilling rights in the Marcellus and Utica shale layers underlying the conventional wells in New York State.
The problem-plagued Freeport LNG export plant is once again completely out of order. The plant had been mostly offline following an episode of cold temps in January (see
According to the U.S. Energy Information Administration (EIA), working natural gas inventories in the U.S. ended the winter heating season (November 1–March 31) at 2,290 billion cubic feet (Bcf), which is 39% more than the previous five-year (2019–23) average. Why is there so much in inventory? Warm weather all winter led to less usage of natural gas. Couple that with high production and it’s a prescription for too much gas in inventory, which leads to (you guessed it), low prices.
MARCELLUS/UTICA REGION: Gov. Josh Shapiro attended White House state dinner; NATIONAL: EIA ups Brent oil price forecast for 2024 and 2025; Nobody cares about climate change except the grifters; U.S. crude production to decline in 2024; SEC climate rule puts us oil and gas industry, consumers at risk; INTERNATIONAL: Panama Canal warns restrictions will remain in place throughout 2024; Enverus says oil demand will not peak before 2030; ICE reports record open interest across its global natgas markets.