PA Bulletin Shale Roundup: 6 Pad Air Permits, 6 Erosion Permits
Welcome to a new weekly MDN feature. Every Saturday, the Pennsylvania Bulletin (the state’s official gazette) publishes page after page of permit applications and approvals from the Department of Environmental Protection (DEP). Most of it covers sewage plants, quarries, and crematories. But buried in there is a steady trickle of shale-related permits: new well pad air permits, earthmoving permits for pads and pipelines, renewals, and spill cleanups. We read it so you don’t have to. Last week’s edition (Oct 31, Vol. 56, No. 44) ran 256 pages. Here’s what matters to the shale crowd. Read More “PA Bulletin Shale Roundup: 6 Pad Air Permits, 6 Erosion Permits”

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).
Infinity Natural Resources, the Morgantown, WV-based driller that bought Antero Resources’ Ohio Utica assets for $1.2 billion earlier this year, isn’t done shopping. CEO Zack Arnold told Hart Energy at its SUPER DUG conference in Houston in September that Infinity is “actively looking for the next opportunity.” Arnold also dropped a few other nuggets worth your attention: Infinity has drilled its first deep dry gas Utica well in a Pennsylvania field that has only ever produced from the Marcellus; a “couple” of unnamed operators are starting to develop the Marcellus in eastern Ohio; and newly available state and federal lands in Ohio are a fresh source of drilling locations.
Back in July, Infinity Natural Resources (INR) told the world it had booked a $57.5 million derivative (hedging) gain for the second quarter, and MDN used the occasion to decode how hedging works (see
We finally have a number. Two weeks after a casing failure sent frack water gushing across the Infinity Natural Resources (NYSE: INR) Cooper well pad in Young Township, Indiana County, PA, the Department of Environmental Protection (DEP) has put an estimate on it: 336,000 gallons of frack flowback water released during the incident. An “undetermined amount” of that reached Whiskey Run, the small stream below the pad. Here’s what that number actually means — and what it still doesn’t tell us.
Infinity Natural Resources (INR), the Morgantown, WV-based pureplay Marcellus/Utica driller, dropped its second quarter 2026 numbers on Monday and walked analysts through them Tuesday morning. The short version: production jumped 75% year over year to 348.5 million cubic feet equivalent per day (MMcfe/d), adjusted EBITDAX hit a company-record $114.7 million, the first wells from the Ohio Utica package INR bought from Antero came online ahead of plan — and INR quietly drilled and cored its first deep dry gas Utica well in Pennsylvania. Full-year guidance was reaffirmed. Not a bad quarter for a company that was still private 18 months ago.
Infinity Natural Resources (INR) put out two press releases Monday night. One was second quarter earnings (we’ll cover that separately after today’s call). The other one is the interesting one. Infinity announced that Cary Baetz will become Executive Vice President and Chief Financial Officer, and Andrew Judge will become Senior Vice President of Finance, both effective Aug. 12. Current CFO David Sproule — the man who financed Infinity from private company through its January 2025 IPO — is out the same day. In July, we wrote that Infinity was quietly assembling a board built for deal-making (see