Mineral Buyers Say Ohio Is Easy Pickings, West Virginia Isn’t
Two panels at THE SUMMIT: Appalachia on July 28 were aimed squarely at the money side of the business — one on minerals and non-operated working interests, one on capital markets. If you own minerals in Ohio or West Virginia, or you’ve been getting letters offering to buy your royalty, the first panel explains exactly who is sending them and why. And both panels landed hard on a financing structure that has quietly moved $15 billion into oil and gas — with several speakers predicting it blows up. MDN was an advertising partner for the event and obtained the transcripts with the organizer’s permission. This is the fourth and final of four articles chronicling the event. Read More “Mineral Buyers Say Ohio Is Easy Pickings, West Virginia Isn’t”
A new report from RBN Energy fills in a piece of the Project Beacon puzzle we haven’t fully covered: two separate Millennium Pipeline expansions — one already sanctioned, one still on the drawing board — that DT Midstream and TC Energy are advancing to feed New England’s growing appetite for Marcellus/Utica gas. One is moving fast. The other needs New York State’s blessing, which is never a sure thing. 
Forward natural gas prices for this coming winter at the Cove Point LNG terminal in Maryland have gone parabolic — and if you produce, gather, or transport Marcellus/Utica gas, you should care, because the pipes behind this story are the same pipes you use every day. A quick primer: a ‘forward price’ is what buyers and sellers agree today to pay for gas delivered on a future date — think of it as locking in a price months ahead of time. When forward prices spike, it means the market is already betting on tight supply or high demand down the road. 
A unanimous Ohio Supreme Court has ordered the tiny Pickaway County village of Ashville to let voters decide the fate of a data center and natural gas power plant — a project the village council tried to fast-track by declaring it an “emergency” not subject to a public vote. The court didn’t buy it. But before opponents celebrate too hard, the ruling doesn’t guarantee a vote will actually happen this November — county election officials still get to decide whether the deal is even the kind of thing voters can weigh in on at all. 
PJM Interconnection and Dominion Energy are reviewing a July 22 event in Northern Virginia in which roughly 3,800 megawatts (MW) of data center load — the largest such disconnection in PJM’s history — unexpectedly ripped itself off the grid after a routine, correctly cleared transmission fault, forcing PJM operators to scramble to keep the grid stable. The event has reignited a fight over whether data centers, which are growing explosively across the PJM footprint (including Marcellus/Utica territory), need to be held to new “ride through” standards so they stop treating minor grid hiccups like five-alarm fires. 
Pennsylvania got off easy in the 2026-27 budget. Only one data center bill made it into law, and it was a toothless one. But the Pittsburgh Business Times reports Harrisburg is loading up for another round this fall — and this time the antis have a working blueprint to copy. It’s called New York, where Gov. Kathy Hochul banned new hyperscale data centers last month, and where the anti-fracking crowd has already spent a decade proving what happens when a state tells industry to go away. 
Remember when Dan Rice IV (older brother of EQT CEO Toby Rice) sold his landfill-gas company Archaea Energy to BP for $4.1 billion back in 2022, pocketing the Rice family somewhere between $720 million and $975 million in the process? Well, what goes around comes around: BP told investors this week it’s now looking to sell Archaea. On the company’s Q2 2026 earnings call, new BP CEO Meg O’Neill said Archaea has turned out to be a “capital-intense” way to play the biogas market, and BP would rather go “capital-light” going forward. Translation: RNG isn’t the money-printer BP thought it would be four years ago, and Big Oil’s would-be savior molecule is getting shopped to the highest bidder. 
OTHER U.S. REGIONS: Conservative group’s ‘right to natural gas’ initiative makes Colorado’s 2026 ballot; NJ data center makes case for on-site power generation during 6-hour hearing; NATIONAL: August heat helps lift U.S. natural gas futures; USA oil, gas workforce hits lowest level in years; Billionaires, misleading campaigns are at the heart of the climate-industrial complex; INTERNATIONAL: Crude steady as Iran risks persist; Indonesia and India are jointly planning a hydrocarbon-powered future; China’s great wall of fossil fuels.