EQT Gives Up an Automatic Win in Elizabeth Twp Permit Fight
Elizabeth Township’s (Allegheny County, PA) Board of Commissioners was supposed to vote by August 21 on EQT’s conditional use permit for the six-well Heracles pad near Elizabeth Forward High School. Instead, at an August 17 workshop meeting, commissioners announced they’d cut a deal with EQT to push the decision into September — saying they need more time. Here’s the part the news coverage skipped: under Pennsylvania’s Municipalities Planning Code, blowing that 45-day deadline would have handed EQT an automatic, deemed approval. The clock was running in EQT’s favor. EQT gave it up voluntarily. That’s not a company scrambling for cover — that’s a company building a record it expects to defend on appeal. Read More “EQT Gives Up an Automatic Win in Elizabeth Twp Permit Fight”
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. 
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). 
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 
EQT Corporation issued second quarter 2026 results on July 21, followed by an analyst call on July 22. Here’s what matters if you lease acreage to EQT — or own the stock. The company produced more gas using less money in 2Q, raising its estimate of how much it will produce in 2026 by 90 Bcfe to 2,375-2,450 Bcfe (which works out to 6.5 to 6.7 Bcfe/d). As a point of reference, the country’s largest natural gas producer, Expand Energy, is estimating production of 7.5 Bcfe/d in 2026. For landowners leased with EQT with older wells, there’s good news about workovers. 
Yes, there is a direct connection between the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission’s (FERC) approval of the expansion of an underground salt-dome storage cavern project in Mississippi and the Marcellus/Utica. FERC has approved Leaf River Energy Center’s expansion of its New Home Salt Dome storage facility in Smith, Jasper, and Clarke counties, Mississippi, adding 19.18 Bcf of working gas capacity through new cavern development and facility upgrades. The project includes a new Cavern 5, expansion of Caverns 2 and 4, new compression, and pipeline additions, raising total working gas capacity from 36.0 to 55.18 Bcf. 
