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OH Point Pleasant Deep Rights Case vs. Rice Ends Days Before Trial
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. Read More “OH Point Pleasant Deep Rights Case vs. Rice Ends Days Before Trial”
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 
The Marcellus/Utica region received (as near as we can tell) 15 new drilling permits last week, July 27 – August 2, down 4 from two weeks ago. The reason for our hesitation is that the Ohio Department of Natural Resources didn’t issue a report for last week. They sometimes are tardy in their report filing, catching it up in the next week’s report. The drillers who received new permits included: Seneca Resources (6), Expand Energy (6), JKLM Energy (2), and Jay-Bee Oil & Gas (1). 
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. 
Houston-based EOG Resources posted record second-quarter 2026 results on August 4th, and buried inside the good news for shareholders is an even better story for Ohio landowners and the Utica supply chain: the former Encino Energy assets EOG bought a year ago are now outperforming the company’s own pre-acquisition playbook. EOG’s CEO called the deal a “home run” on the August 5th earnings call, and the numbers back him up — well costs down 20% from where Encino left them, drilling and completion speeds up double digits, and activity levels more than tripled versus pre-acquisition rates. Company-wide, EOG posted $2.7 billion in adjusted net income ($5.07/share), $2.8 billion of free cash flow, and record oil volumes of 548.8 MBod. Full detail below, with the Utica numbers front and center. 
Gulfport Energy dropped its second quarter 2026 numbers on Monday (Aug. 3), followed by an analyst call Tuesday morning — the first for new President and CEO Nick Dell’Osso, who took the chair May 28 after running Chesapeake/Expand Energy for five years. The profit line went the wrong direction. But strip away the accountants’ noise, and there’s a genuinely good story here for Ohio landowners, for the service companies that turn dirt, and for anyone holding the stock. 
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. 
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. 
A Harrison County landowner and longtime pro-drilling voice is now accusing EOG Resources of “theft” — and while the word grabs headlines, the underlying dispute is a lot more nuanced than one company stealing one man’s mineral rights. A recent report from Your Ohio News lays out landowner Ron Ott’s grievances against EOG, but bundles together at least four separate issues into one story. We think MDN readers deserve the untangled version. 
CNX Resources posted its second quarter 2026 results last Thursday, and the numbers tell two stories at once. On the drilling side, CNX is running lean — just 2 wells drilled all quarter. On the financial side, the company spent more buying back its own stock ($199 million) than it spent drilling and completing wells. When a producer would rather buy its own shares than drill, that says something about where gas prices sit right now — and where management thinks they’re headed.