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8 New Shale Well Permits Reported for PA-OH-WV Aug 3 – 9
The Marcellus/Utica region received 8 new drilling permits last week, August 3 – 9, down 7 from two weeks ago. Pitiful. (Cue Linda Ronstadt’s “Poor, Poor, Pitiful Me“) It’s actually a little worse than that. Two weeks ago, the Ohio Department of Natural Resources didn’t issue a report. One of the Ohio permits from last week is actually from two weeks ago. Pennsylvania only issued 2 new permits, Ohio issued 6 (5 new + 1 tardy), and West Virginia was a big, fat goose egg. The drillers who received new permits were: Apex Energy (4), Ascent Resources (1), EOG Resources (1), and Expand Energy (2). Read More “8 New Shale Well Permits Reported for PA-OH-WV Aug 3 – 9”
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. 
Remember when Dan Rice IV (older brother of EQT CEO Toby Rice) sold his landfill-gas company Archaea Energy to BP for $4.1 billion back in 2022, pocketing the Rice family somewhere between $720 million and $975 million in the process? Well, what goes around comes around: BP told investors this week it’s now looking to sell Archaea. On the company’s Q2 2026 earnings call, new BP CEO Meg O’Neill said Archaea has turned out to be a “capital-intense” way to play the biogas market, and BP would rather go “capital-light” going forward. Translation: RNG isn’t the money-printer BP thought it would be four years ago, and Big Oil’s would-be savior molecule is getting shopped to the highest bidder. 
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. 
Devon Energy and Williams spent the last week of July doing something that doesn’t show up on a reserve report: teaching northeastern Pennsylvania teenagers how the gas business actually works. Then, on July 30, the Pennsylvania Chamber Foundation named both companies “Greatest Places to Intern in PA.” Six days later, Devon CEO Clay Gaspar told analysts he’s fielding “no shortage of incoming phone calls” about which assets he might sell — with the Marcellus at the top of everybody’s list. Which raises a question nobody on Wall Street is asking: who inherits the workforce machine? 
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. 
Northern Oil & Gas (NOG) is a Minnesota company most people file under “Bakken,” so its quarterly report doesn’t usually land on our radar. It should have. NOG is the largest publicly traded non-operator in the country — it buys minority working interests and lets somebody else run the rig — and after last week’s second quarter release, Appalachia is its biggest gas engine. Marcellus-Utica volumes set another company record, and CEO Nick O’Grady said NOG has quietly spent north of $100 million buying Utica drilling locations in the past year, with lease bonuses up “50-plus percent” since the campaign began. 
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 
A federal magistrate judge has excluded six people (well, five leases covering six people and one municipal authority) from the 2,300-plus-member class suing XTO Energy over royalty underpayments in Butler County — not because XTO won a big legal fight, but because both sides agreed these particular leases require arbitration, not a courtroom. This is the latest chapter in Kriley v. XTO Energy Inc., the six-year-old Butler County royalty case MDN has followed since February (see 
Ascent Resources — one of the largest privately held oil and gas producers in the U.S. and the biggest gas driller in Ohio’s Utica Shale — issued its second quarter 2026 results on Wednesday. Ascent flowed 2,194 MMcfe/d (2.19 Bcfe/d) and booked a $303 million profit. But the real story for MDN readers isn’t the profit line. It’s what Ascent did with its checkbook: a leasing spree that nearly quadrupled land spending year over year, and a July deal that hands back a quarter-Bcf/d of long-haul pipeline space. 
Diversified Energy — the outfit that almost certainly owns more oil and gas wells than any other company in America — reported second quarter 2026 results on Aug. 5, and the big news is that after 25 years of buying up other people’s wells, Diversified is finally going to drill some of its own. Just not here in the Marcellus/Utica. 
With Devon Energy’s first full quarter as a combined Devon-Coterra company now in the books, the numbers on the former Coterra Marcellus assets tell an interesting story — one that lines up with what MDN has been reporting for months about activist pressure to sell the Appalachian position. Devon reported second-quarter 2026 earnings on August 4, followed by an analyst call on August 5. Buried in the supplemental tables and sprinkled through management’s answers to Wall Street analysts is a clear picture of how the Marcellus fits (or doesn’t) into the new, Permian-obsessed Devon. Below we break down what the company said — and didn’t say — about its Northeast Pennsylvania gas position, plus the latest on the broader portfolio review that has investors like Kimmeridge Energy pushing for a Marcellus sale.