Allegheny County | Ascent Resources | Beaver County | Elk County | Encino Energy | Energy Companies | EQT Corp | Greene County (PA) | Guernsey County | Harrison County | Inflection Energy | Lycoming County | Marshall County | Ohio | Pennsylvania | Range Resources Corp | Seneca Resources | Tug Hill Operating | Utica Resource Operating | Weekly Permits | West Virginia
19 New Shale Well Permits Issued for PA-OH-WV Aug 22-28
Last week the three states with active Marcellus/Utica drilling, Pennsylvania, Ohio, and West Virginia, issued a collective 19 new drilling permits, down from 30 the week before. The top receiver of permits in PA was EQT (i.e. Rice Drilling), with five permits issued for the same well pad in Greene County. Range Resources and Inflection Energy each received two new permits.
Read More “19 New Shale Well Permits Issued for PA-OH-WV Aug 22-28”
In September 2021, the Weirton (WV) Zoning Board of Appeals rejected a request by Southwestern Energy to build a well pad inside city limits (see 
Drillers (exploration and production companies, or E&Ps) were thrilled with record-high earnings and cash flow in the second quarter of this year. Soaring commodity prices and “strict financial discipline” on the part of oil and gas drillers resulted in pre-tax operating earnings and cash flows surging by 29% and 22%, respectively, from 1Q22. And 1Q22 was up too! So what did drillers, especially drillers in the Marcellus/Utica, do with all that extra cash? Did they pay down debt? Buy back shares of company stock? Issue higher dividends? Something else?
Antero Resources is one of the largest drillers in the Marcellus/Utica (with major assets in West Virginia). The company is the fifth largest natgas producer in the country and the second largest LNG exporter. It’s also one of our favorite Marcellus/Utica drillers. As good and careful as companies like Antero are when hiring, sometimes there’s a rotten apple found in the barrel. Such was the case with a former employee who headed up the company’s operations in WV–where most of its drilling happens. The former employee took bribes and kickbacks from a vendor over a period of years (2012-2015), steering contracts to that vendor. The vendor’s performance was not as good as other competitors. At the end of years of litigation, Antero has finally been awarded compensation from a jury, and a bit extra from a judge, to make up for the actions of their rogue employee.
Olympus Energy (formerly Huntley & Huntley) drills in the Greater Pittsburgh region, in Allegheny and Westmoreland counties. Last year Olympus filed an application to build a new well pad in a rural part of Allegheny County, in West Deer Township. So-called “concerned citizens” (anti-fossil fuel zealots) got amped up to oppose the rural project (see 
BKV Corporation (Banpu Kalnin Ventures), the American shale drilling arm of Banpu of Thailand (Banpu owns 96% of BKV), originally entered the American shale sector by investing over $500 million in 2016-2017 to buy existing Marcellus wells and acreage in northeast Pennsylvania. Over the past seven years, BKV has become one of the top 20 gas-weighted natural gas producers in the U.S. BKV is now (with recent purchases) the largest natural gas producer in the Barnett Shale. The company is on a mission to be so-called net zero emissions (Scopes 1 & 2) by 2025. One of the ways the company plans to do it is by using ESG technology from Verde Co2 CCS, LLC.
Talk about irony! Scared of the potential impacts of the coronavirus and with the price of oil crashing in March 2020 (just as COVID was getting started), Royal Dutch Shell pulled out of a 50/50 joint venture partnership with Energy Transfer (ET) to build a new LNG export facility in Lake Charles, Louisiana (see 
In April 2021, MDN brought you the news that Chesapeake Energy, after buying Eagle Ford oil assets in 2018 for $4 billion (during the reign of Doug Lawler), was looking to unload those assets for around $2 billion (see 
Looks like $2 billion is just too much of a temptation for Shell, Equinor (formerly known as Statoil), and U.S. Steel to resist. Those three companies have been a part of a joint effort with EQT, Williams, Southwestern Energy, and a few other companies in a group called Appalachian Energy Future (AEF), which was supposed to be the “one ring to rule them all” group aimed at enticing a hydrogen hub to one of the three Marcellus/Utica states (see 
Now we know why Diversified Energy liked Traitor Joe Manchin’s sell-out Green New Deal law, also falsely referred to as the Inflation Reduction Act (see 
Seneca Resources, a 100% subsidiary and the drilling arm of National Fuel Gas Company, announced on Tuesday that the company has achieved an “A” certification grade under the MiQ Standard for Methane Emissions Performance (MiQ Standard), the highest available certification level MiQ awards, for all of the company’s 1+ billion cubic feet per day (Bcf/d) of natural gas production in the Marcellus/Utica. Seneca can now claim it produces responsible gas and the molecules can be traded/bundled on the MiQ Digital Registry.
Coterra Energy was formed by the merger of Cabot Oil & Gas (Marcellus gas driller) with Cimarex Energy (Permian gas driller) last October (see