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
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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.