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.
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.”
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. 
Norway’s Equinor — the company we all used to call Statoil — announced Monday it is buying a majority interest in the Lackawanna Energy Center (LEC), the big Marcellus-fired power plant in Jessup, PA, just outside Scranton. Equinor is paying $940 million for 87.71% of the Class A shares in the 1,483-megawatt plant, buying them from funds managed by Global Infrastructure Partners (GIP), which is now part of BlackRock. Invenergy, which built LEC and has run it since day one, stays on as operator. MDN has followed this plant since it was nothing but a proposal and a pile of angry town council meetings (see 
A Wall Street rumor landed Tuesday that most of the financial press covered as a Wall Street story. We’re going to cover it as a Susquehanna County story — because buried inside UGI Corporation, the Valley Forge-based utility holding company that private equity giant KKR reportedly wants to buy for $9 billion, sits one of the more important collections of gathering, storage and pipeline assets in the northeast Marcellus. 
Here’s a number every Marcellus and Utica landowner should tape to the refrigerator: $5. That’s where Colorado-based East Daley Analytics thinks Henry Hub natural gas prices are headed by 2031, and the reason is the LNG export buildout on the Gulf Coast, which the firm says will pull roughly 35 billion cubic feet of gas per day out of the U.S. supply pool by 2035. The catch — and it’s a big one — is that nobody has fully answered where all that gas comes from. East Daley published the analysis Aug. 18 in its Daley Note. Most of it is Gulf Coast and Permian Basin material. But bury the lede, and you miss what matters for the M-U audience. 
OTHER U.S. REGIONS: First ‘gas-plus-nuclear’ plant for data centers; NATIONAL: U.S. natural gas futures rise on near-term weather; Energy stocks soar to record; Battle over data centers is reminiscent of battle over electrification; Net zero is dead and gone; INTERNATIONAL: Oil hits three-week high on Iran standoff; Electricity policy is economic policy – the race for reliable power.