Dell’Osso’s First Quarter at Gulfport: Buy More Utica, Rethink Okla.
Gulfport Energy dropped its second quarter 2026 numbers on Monday (Aug. 3), followed by an analyst call Tuesday morning — the first for new President and CEO Nick Dell’Osso, who took the chair May 28 after running Chesapeake/Expand Energy for five years. The profit line went the wrong direction. But strip away the accountants’ noise, and there’s a genuinely good story here for Ohio landowners, for the service companies that turn dirt, and for anyone holding the stock. Read More “Dell’Osso’s First Quarter at Gulfport: Buy More Utica, Rethink Okla.”
Peregrine Energy Partners, the Dallas-based royalty buyer we’ve been tracking since 2019, is back in the Marcellus/Utica with its checkbook open. Yesterday (Aug. 4), the company announced it closed five separate mineral and royalty deals — two of them right here in the M-U — totaling roughly 3,680 net royalty acres and interests in more than 1,240 producing wells. The first Appalachian deal is a cash-flowing overriding royalty portfolio in Susquehanna County, PA, covering about 936 gross acres and 86 producing horizontal Coterra Energy (now Devon Energy) wells, with more than 50 DUCs and PUDs behind them in both the Upper and Lower Marcellus. 
On July 30, French environmental services giant Veolia announced it had been picked by “a major project developer” to operate and maintain a 350-megawatt (MW) microgrid that will power an artificial intelligence data center campus in Ohio. The press release carried a New Albany, Ohio dateline. It’s a genuinely big deal — a behind-the-meter power plant that will supply 100% of a data center campus without leaning on the grid at all. Here’s the dots nobody else has connected. This is the same Veolia that Antero Resources and Antero Midstream spent six years suing over a botched frack wastewater plant in West Virginia. And Veolia announced this shiny new Ohio contract exactly six days after wiring Antero a check for $371 million. You can’t make this stuff up. 
A Harrison County landowner and longtime pro-drilling voice is now accusing EOG Resources of “theft” — and while the word grabs headlines, the underlying dispute is a lot more nuanced than one company stealing one man’s mineral rights. A recent report from Your Ohio News lays out landowner Ron Ott’s grievances against EOG, but bundles together at least four separate issues into one story. We think MDN readers deserve the untangled version. 
CNX Resources posted its second quarter 2026 results last Thursday, and the numbers tell two stories at once. On the drilling side, CNX is running lean — just 2 wells drilled all quarter. On the financial side, the company spent more buying back its own stock ($199 million) than it spent drilling and completing wells. When a producer would rather buy its own shares than drill, that says something about where gas prices sit right now — and where management thinks they’re headed. 
The Marcellus/Utica region received 19 new drilling permits last week, July 20 – 26, down 7 from two weeks ago. Last week, Pennsylvania issued 10 new permits. Ohio issued 4 new permits. And West Virginia issued 5 new permits. The drillers who received new permits included: Ascent Resources (1), EOG Resources (1), EQT (7), Expand Energy (5), Infinity Natural Resources (2), Range Resources (2), and Snyder Brothers (1). 
Antero Resources, the biggest driller in West Virginia and roughly 11% of all Appalachian production, dropped its second quarter 2026 numbers on July 29 and held its analyst call the next morning. Three things jumped off the page: a record quarter, a dry gas well result that borders on spectacular, and a rare public admission that Antero turned down a power deal in its own backyard because the money wasn’t good enough. 
National Fuel Gas Company (NFG) — the Williamsville, NY company that drills (Seneca Resources), pipes (NFG Supply Corporation, Empire), and sells gas at the meter (NFG Distribution Corp) — issued its fiscal third quarter update Wednesday evening and talked it over with analysts Thursday morning. NFG’s fiscal year ends September 30, so their “third quarter” is everyone else’s second quarter (April–June). There’s a lot in here for Marcellus/Utica watchers, but two items stand out: Supply Corporation more than tripled the size of its Line N System Upgrade Project, and Seneca is about to start writing big checks to landowners in Tioga County. 
Expand Energy, the largest natural gas producer in the country, reported its second-quarter 2026 numbers on Tuesday and held its analyst call Wednesday morning. Headline items: net production of 7.48 Bcfe/d (billion cubic feet equivalent per day), net income of $522 million, and a reaffirmed full-year guide of 7.4–7.6 Bcfe/d on $2.75–$2.95 billion of capital spending. But the news that matters most to MDN readers isn’t in the headline — it’s buried in the slide deck. Expand quietly paid roughly $5,000 an acre for 3,000 acres in core Bradford County, Pennsylvania, and turned in the best drilling quarter in the history of its Southwest Appalachia business. Meanwhile, interim CEO Mike Wichterich says the search for a permanent boss is in “the back third” and will land inside the promised nine months. Let’s break it down. 
Infinity Natural Resources, the Morgantown, WV-based operator running Utica Shale acreage in eastern Ohio and stacked dry-gas Marcellus/Utica positions in southwestern Pennsylvania, put out a preliminary hedging update on July 17th, giving the market a first look at its second-quarter derivative results before full Q2 earnings land. We thought that we would take the opportunity to try and explain (decode) what all of this hedging (derivatives) stuff is about. The headline number: a net derivative gain of approximately $57.5 million for the quarter ended June 30, 2026. That figure is a combination of two very different things, and it’s worth separating them. 
Expand Energy, the largest natural gas producer in North America and a giant in the Marcellus/Utica, announced yesterday that it has signed a definitive agreement to buy Twin Eagle Holdings for $1.25 billion in cash from private equity owner Five Point Infrastructure. Twin Eagle is not a driller. It doesn’t own a single well. It’s a physical gas marketer — a middleman that buys gas from producers, moves it through pipelines and storage, and sells it to utilities, power plants, and factories. Twin Eagle markets more than 5 Bcf/d (billion cubic feet per day), controls 44 Bcf (billion cubic feet) of storage and roughly 2 Bcf/d of firm pipeline capacity, and serves over 1,000 customers across the U.S. and Canada. The deal is expected to close in the third quarter. When it does, Expand becomes the country’s biggest gas seller as well as its biggest gas producer. 
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 July 25th Pennsylvania Bulletin that the SRBC approved and/or renewed 21 general water use permits in June for individual shale gas well drilling pads in Clearfield, Lycoming, Sullivan, Susquehanna, Tioga, and Wyoming counties. 
Well, this isn’t what we expected. Bloomberg reported Friday, citing unnamed people “familiar with the matter,” that Devon Energy is exploring a sale of two of its shale positions — the Eagle Ford in South Texas and the Powder River Basin in Wyoming — that together could bring in more than $4 billion. Devon plans to announce a formal strategic review of the two packages when it releases second-quarter results in early August (the release is scheduled for Tuesday, Aug. 4, with the analyst call the next morning). Nothing is final. The timing could slip, and Devon could decide to keep both. Just two weeks ago we told you activist investor Kimmeridge is beating on Devon for moving too slowly on divestitures following the Coterra merger (see 
Yesterday, EQT Corporation, the largest Marcellus/Utica-only producer by far, issued its second-quarter 2026 update. We’re pulling out what we consider to be the biggest news from that update for this separate post. During an earnings call with analysts, EQT CEO Toby Rice said that since the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission (FERC) approved the company’s 31-mile Mountain Valley Pipeline (MVP) Southgate project from southern Virginia into northern North Carolina in June (see