M-U Falls to 33, Lowest Since 2024; Nat’l Stuck at 588 3rd Week
Two things happened last week, and both of them are unusual. Pennsylvania dropped a rig to 15, pulling the combined Marcellus/Utica down to 33 — a number we haven’t printed since the fall of 2024. And the national count came in at 588 for the third consecutive week. Not 588, then 587, then 589. The same number, three times in a row. We’ve been writing this column a long time, and we can’t recall the national count sitting perfectly still for three straight reports. Underneath it, the shuffle continued: two more oil rigs, two fewer gas rigs. Look at the price sheet, and you’ll see why. WTI settled Friday near $90.76 a barrel. Natural gas settled around $2.98 per MMBtu. Read More “M-U Falls to 33, Lowest Since 2024; Nat’l Stuck at 588 3rd Week”
Devon Energy’s Coterra unit is asking Pennsylvania regulators for permission to lay 18.4 miles of 20-inch freshwater pipeline across three Susquehanna County townships — which is a strange thing to spend money on if you’re about to sell the place. The Department of Environmental Protection (DEP) published the notice in the September 5 Pennsylvania Bulletin, opening a comment window that closes October 5. The project is the Brooks to Forwood Temporary Waterline, running through Springville, Lathrop, and Lenox townships. 
Shell Chemical Appalachia signed a consent order and agreement (COA) with the Pennsylvania Dept. of Environmental Protection (DEP) last Friday, Sept. 4, agreeing to hand over $15 million to settle three years’ worth of air, storage tank, and water violations at its Monaca (Beaver County) ethane cracker. Half of it — $7.5 million — is an actual civil penalty. The other half is a “contribution” to a brand-new community fund. If that arrangement sounds familiar, it should. It’s the same two-bucket structure the Shapiro administration used to squeeze nearly $10 million out of Shell back in May 2023. 
The hill above Homer City now has more people working on it than the borough below has living in it. Homer City Generation dropped a Labor Day announcement on Friday: more than 1,800 direct-hire tradespeople and skilled contractors are on site building the 4.4-gigawatt (GW) gas-fired plant and data center campus rising from the bones of what was once Pennsylvania’s largest coal-fired power station. The borough of Homer City has roughly 1,800 residents. That’s a nice bit of symmetry, and it says more about what this project means to Indiana County than any press release paragraph could. 
Ohio has asked PJM to dust off a rarely used piece of grid-planning machinery — a tool invented to string wires to offshore wind farms — and use it instead to speed up $4.2 billion in new high-voltage power lines to the 10-gigawatt SoftBank data center and gas plant complex at Piketon. We got our hands on the letter. It’s dated June 15, 2026, from PUCO Federal Energy Advocate Sarah J. Parrot to PJM President and CEO David E. Mills, and it’s been sitting quietly for nearly three months. It surfaced this week because PJM is briefing its Transmission Expansion Advisory Committee (TEAC) on the request today, Sept. 8, to use the “state agreement approach.” 
Six weeks after announcing it would sell up to 49% of its $1.2 billion Florida Energy Pathway pipeline (see 
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