EQT Is #1 in U.S. Gas Reserves, New EY Benchmarking Study Shows
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. Read More “EQT Is #1 in U.S. Gas Reserves, New EY Benchmarking Study Shows”

The Marcellus/Utica region received 39 new drilling permits last week, August 24 – 30, up significantly from the 19 permits issued two weeks ago. Pennsylvania finally bounced back, issuing the vast majority of the new permits, with 25. Ohio issued 8 permits. And West Virginia issued 6 new permits. The drillers who received new permits were: Antero Resources, Campbell Oil & Gas, CNX Resources, EOG Resources, EQT, Expand Energy, Infinity Natural Resources, PennEnergy Resources, and Repsol Oil & Gas.
EQT is planning another pipeline — and this one is big. Through a brand-new subsidiary called Appalachian Transmission Gateway LLC (ATG), the Marcellus/Utica’s largest driller has opened bidding on the “POWER Pipeline,” a 42-inch, 50-mile line that would carry a full 1 billion cubic feet per day (Bcf/d) of gas from Greene County, Pennsylvania, west to the Clarington hub in Monroe County, Ohio. The open season quietly began Aug. 26 and runs through Oct. 26. We found no press release announcing it — the notice simply went up, and the trade press caught it a week later.
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.
Sixty-two days after a wastewater pipeline let go at Equitrans’ Richter impoundment in Aleppo Township, Greene County, the Pennsylvania Dept. of Environmental Protection (DEP) went back out to look at the site on August 18 — and didn’t like what it found. Contaminated water is still moving, soil is still dirty, and DEP says the cleanup has largely stalled. Quick refresher for those just tuning in. On June 17, 2026, Equitrans Water SVC (PA) LLC — the water-handling arm of EQT — reported a wastewater release from a pipeline tied to its Richter Shale Gas Water Impoundment while the site was being reclaimed. DEP issued a cleanup order on June 30 requiring the company to stop contaminated water from migrating off site and from reaching ground or surface water.
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.
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. 

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.
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. 

If you’ve been to an energy conference in the last year, you’ve heard someone say EQT is forecasting 100 Bcf/d of new natural gas demand by 2030. It happened at
One of the biggest landowner-vs.-driller cases in Ohio shale history just ended — with no verdict, no dollar figure, and a two-page piece of paper. On July 29, a group of Belmont County mineral owners and Rice Drilling D LLC (owned by EQT) jointly asked a federal judge to throw out the case for good, roughly two months after it was supposed to go in front of a jury. Eight years, 580 docket entries, and one of the most consequential lease questions in the Utica — settled behind closed doors.
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.