Beaver County | Energy Companies | Ethane | Industrywide Issues | M&A | Pennsylvania | Processing Plants | Shell
Four Bidders Circle Shell’s Monaca, PA Ethane Cracker Plant
For a year and a half, MDN has tracked the on-again, on-again saga of Shell trying to unload its chemicals business — including the $14 billion Monaca (Beaver County, PA) ethane cracker complex that turns Marcellus/Utica ethane into plastic pellets. We first flagged the rumor in March 2025 (see Shocker: Shell Considers Selling Beaver County, PA Ethane Cracker). CEO Wael Sawan confirmed it that August, saying Shell is “not the natural operator and owner of that asset.” As recently as May, Sawan was still saying “maybe.” Now we finally have names. Read More “Four Bidders Circle Shell’s Monaca, PA Ethane Cracker Plant”
A press release from BKV Corporation (NYSE: BKV) last week announced that a Form S-3 registration statement covering 5.3 million shares held by its Thai parent’s power arm had taken effect. It sounds like news. It isn’t. But it sent us back through BKV’s second quarter numbers, and those tell a story northeastern Pennsylvania landowners ought to hear: the Marcellus assets that launched this company are now 10% of its reserves, and they’re getting essentially none of BKV’s growth money. 
A federal appeals court has handed XTO Energy (ExxonMobil’s shale subsidiary) a win in a long-running Western Pennsylvania royalty lawsuit, ruling Monday that XTO did NOT give up its right to push some landowners into private arbitration — even though it spent 55 months litigating the case before it asked. The case is Salvatora v. XTO Energy Inc., a cousin of the Kriley case MDN has also followed. Same defendant, same Pittsburgh courthouse, same plaintiffs’ firm, same complaint: landowners say XTO shaved too much off their royalty checks for “post-production costs” — the gathering, compression, and processing charges that move gas from the wellhead to a buyer. 
The highly functional and responsible Susquehanna River Basin Commission (SRBC), unlike its dysfunctional and irresponsible counterpart, the Delaware River Basin Commission (DRBC), continues to support the shale energy industry by approving water withdrawals and consumptive use requests for responsible, safe shale drilling. The SRBC published a notice in the August 22nd Pennsylvania Bulletin that the SRBC approved and/or renewed 35 general water use permits in July for individual shale gas well drilling pads in Bradford, Centre, Clearfield, Clinton, Lycoming, Susquehanna, Tioga, and Wyoming counties. 
The Marcellus/Utica region received 27 new drilling permits last week, August 10 – 16, up significantly from the 8 permits issued two weeks ago. In something of a reversal, Pennsylvania turned in the fewest new permits, just 4. Ohio issued the most permits, with 16, and West Virginia issued 7 permits. The drillers who received new permits were: Antero Resources (6), Ascent Resources (5), EOG Resources (8), Expand Energy (4), Jay-Bee Oil & Gas (1), LOLA Energy (1), Range Resources (1), and Seneca Resources (1). 
Epsilon Energy (NASDAQ: EPSN) keeps calling its Susquehanna County, PA, acreage a “legacy” asset — and then keeps telling investors it’s sitting on up to 200 billion cubic feet of gas it hasn’t produced yet. At the EnerCom Denver energy investment conference on Tuesday, Epsilon’s VP of Finance put hard numbers on the northeast Pennsylvania position for the first time, disclosed pad-level economics that are rare to see in public, and dropped the news item that matters most to anyone with a lease inside the Auburn dedication: the company is reviewing an expansion of the Auburn Gas Gathering System to handle drilling coming in 2028 and beyond. 
Six days after WhiteHawk Minerals (NYSE: WHK) filed its first quarterly report as a public company, CEO Daniel Herz took the stage at EnerCom Denver and did something CEOs usually avoid: he put a dated natural gas price forecast on the record. He thinks $4 gas is the number that unlocks the next wave of supply, he doesn’t think the Haynesville gets where people expect, and he thinks the back half of this decade is going to be a roller coaster. 
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 
Devon Energy just told the market it’s willing to write big checks to get stranded natural gas to better markets. The gas in question is in West Texas, not Susquehanna County — and that says something about where the old Cabot Oil & Gas assets stand in the new Devon. On Monday, Devon announced a positive Final Investment Decision (FID — meaning the money is committed and the shovels are coming) on the Solitude Pipeline System, a WhiteWater-led joint venture building two 48-inch natural gas pipelines from the Permian Basin to Katy, Texas. 
In March, MDN told you that Butler County landowners were appealing after a federal judge tossed their royalty class action against XTO Energy (see 
Competitive Power Ventures (CPV) and EQT Corporation have signed a 10-year gas supply agreement that locks up the entire fuel appetite of the CPV Shay Energy Center, the $3 billion, 2,100-megawatt (MW) combined-cycle plant headed for Doddridge County, West Virginia. It’s the deal that turns Shay from a project on paper into a project with a fuel contract. 
Epsilon Energy (NASDAQ: EPSN), the non-op partner that bankrolls a chunk of Expand Energy’s Marcellus drilling in Susquehanna County, PA, reported Q2 2026 results last week showing Pennsylvania gas production down sharply — but for a reason that’s actually good news for the wells coming next. Epsilon also sold off a package of small Marcellus overriding royalty interests for $3.9 million and confirmed five new wells are headed for completion by December, which should boost both production and Auburn Gas Gathering System throughput.