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WV Lawsuit Blames Benzene, “Radioactive” Brine for Driver’s Cancer
A Roane County, WV, man who spent 12 years driving a truck hauling crude oil and brine has sued 15 energy companies, claiming that on-the-job exposure to benzene and “radioactive fracking brine” gave him a rare bone marrow cancer. The defendant list includes some of the biggest names in the Marcellus/Utica: Antero, EQT, Coterra, Expand Energy (formerly Chesapeake), and Shell. Read More “WV Lawsuit Blames Benzene, “Radioactive” Brine for Driver’s Cancer”
The Marcellus/Utica region received 9 new shale well permits last week, Oct. 19 – 25, down 3 from 12 the week before. Pennsylvania issued 4 new permits, Ohio issued 4, and West Virginia issued 1. The drillers who received new-well permits last week were: Antero Resources, Gulfport, INR, JKLM Energy, and Snyder Brothers. It was a quieter week on the new-permit front. The busiest driller of all, EOG Resources, didn’t get a single permit for a brand-new well — but it did get seven permits to tweak wells it was already approved to drill in Ohio (more on that below). 
Antero Resources, the biggest driller in West Virginia, pumped out a company-record 4.234 Bcfe/d (billion cubic feet equivalent per day) in 3Q26. That’s up 23% from a year ago. And Antero did it while shutting in more than 100 MMcfe/d of dry gas on purpose, because local prices got so bad that on some weekends in September and October, gas went for 60 to 65 cents. Antero plans to shut in even more gas in 4Q, so it lowered its 4Q forecast to 4.3 Bcfe/d. Back in July, it promised 4.4 to 4.5 Bcfe/d. The good news? Antero says prices for its natural gas liquids (NGLs), meaning propane, butane, and their cousins, have jumped about 50% since 3Q ended. And Antero hedges almost none of its NGLs, so it keeps nearly all of that gain. 
Antero Midstream (AM) has a new pipeline on the drawing board. During Thursday’s 3Q26 earnings call, CEO Michael Kennedy said AM wants to build a North-South pipeline from Antero Resources’ West Virginia field north to the Clarington, Ohio, market. Kennedy said AM is “scoping it right now” and spending “a little initial capital” to assess it, and that “you’ll probably see us FID that in 2027.” (FID means final investment decision, the point where a company commits to build.) There was no press release. The news came out in answer to a question from a Goldman Sachs analyst. 
Accounting giant Ernst & Young dropped its annual reserves benchmarking study yesterday, and while the press release leads with oil, the real story for our part of the country is buried in the tables: EQT is now the largest holder of proved natural gas reserves in the United States, and Appalachian-focused producers control roughly a third of all the gas reserves booked by America’s 30 biggest publicly traded drillers. 
Appalachian drillers just got a hard lesson in how fast the money can vanish. New analysis from RBN Energy shows pre-tax profits at gas-weighted producers cratered 75% in the second quarter — and nine of the ten companies in RBN’s gas-weighted peer group are Marcellus/Utica operators. This is an M-U report card, whether RBN calls it one or not. The piece, written by Nicholas Cacchione and published August 26, covers second quarter results for 37 publicly traded exploration and production companies (E&Ps). RBN sorts them into three buckets: Oil-Weighted, Diversified, and Gas-Weighted. Every company in that last bucket except Comstock Resources — a Haynesville player — has major operations in the Marcellus or Utica. 
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. 
WhiteHawk Minerals (NYSE: WHK), the Philadelphia company that has quietly become one of the largest mineral and royalty owners in the Marcellus, filed its first full quarterly report as a public company this week: $111.8 million of new acquisitions, record production of 70.0 MMcfe/d, and its first real dividend at $2.00 per share annualized. But the most interesting thing WhiteHawk said all week wasn’t in the press release. It came out of CEO Daniel Herz’s mouth on Thursday’s earnings call — some of the biggest drillers in Appalachia are now partnering with WhiteHawk to buy minerals ahead of the drill bit. 
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.