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PA Bulletin Shale Roundup: Shell Title V, 3 Pads, 4 Erosion Permits
Week two of MDN’s weekly trip through the Pennsylvania Bulletin, and this one has a whale in it: Shell’s Beaver County cracker plant is finally getting its permanent air permit. The Nov. 7 edition (Vol. 56, No. 45) ran 184 pages. Beyond Shell, DEP signed off on three well pad air permits, four erosion permits, a pair of new gas pipelines in Tioga County, and three frac water recycling setups. A second gas-powered “compute center” also got its permit in Clearfield County. Here’s what matters to the shale crowd… Read More “PA Bulletin Shale Roundup: Shell Title V, 3 Pads, 4 Erosion Permits”
When EQT announced on Oct. 26 that it would buy Range Resources (see 
Range Resources, the company that drilled the very first Marcellus Shale well back in 2004 on the Renz farm in Washington County, filed its third quarter 2026 update yesterday. It’s likely one of the last quarterly reports Range will file as an independent company. EQT announced Monday that it will buy Range in an all-stock deal worth about $13 billion (see 
On Monday, we brought you the news that EQT Corporation is swallowing Range Resources in an all-stock deal that values Range at roughly $12.8 billion and creates a combined company worth more than $50 billion, including debt (see 
Every Saturday, the Pennsylvania Bulletin publishes pages of DEP permit notices that almost nobody reads. We read them so you don’t have to. Taken one at a time, most look routine: an erosion permit here, an air permit there. Lined up side by side, they tell you which drillers are building, and where. Last weekend’s edition (Oct. 24) shows Expand Energy busy across the Northern Tier, Repsol and Seneca/NFG working in Tioga County, Devon still building in Susquehanna County, and XTO getting a new pad ready in Butler County. 
Twenty-two years ago today, Range Resources’ Renz #1 well in Washington County, PA, unlocked the Marcellus Shale and kicked off the shale revolution here in the Northeast. This morning, on that very anniversary, Range agreed to sell itself to EQT Corporation in an all-stock deal that creates the largest natural gas producer in the country, period. MDN has been writing about the Marcellus/Utica since Jan. 2009, and we can’t think of a bigger piece of news to hit the region. The company that started it all is being folded into the company that turned it into an industrial powerhouse. Below we give you the deal numbers, then the best stuff from this morning’s 8 a.m. conference call with analysts—including what this means (for now) for landowners and the midstream. 
The Marcellus/Utica region received 12 new shale well permits last week, October 12-18, up 3 from 9 the week before. Pennsylvania issued 9 of the new permits. Ohio issued 2. And West Virginia issued a single new permit. The drillers who received new-well permits last week were: Antero Resources, Ascent Resources, Expand Energy, Range Resources, and Seneca Resources. Before we go further, a quick housekeeping note: Starting this week, MDN counts only permits for brand-new wells in the headline number. State agencies also issue renewals (more time to drill a well that was already permitted), modifications (changes to a well that was already permitted, like a new wellbore path), and in Ohio, “deepen” permits. Those wells were already counted the first time around, so counting them again would double-count. We now list them separately, in their own section below. 
Accounting giant Ernst & Young dropped its annual reserves benchmarking study yesterday, and while the press release leads with oil, the real story for our part of the country is buried in the tables: EQT is now the largest holder of proved natural gas reserves in the United States, and Appalachian-focused producers control roughly a third of all the gas reserves booked by America’s 30 biggest publicly traded drillers. 
Appalachian drillers just got a hard lesson in how fast the money can vanish. New analysis from RBN Energy shows pre-tax profits at gas-weighted producers cratered 75% in the second quarter — and nine of the ten companies in RBN’s gas-weighted peer group are Marcellus/Utica operators. This is an M-U report card, whether RBN calls it one or not. The piece, written by Nicholas Cacchione and published August 26, covers second quarter results for 37 publicly traded exploration and production companies (E&Ps). RBN sorts them into three buckets: Oil-Weighted, Diversified, and Gas-Weighted. Every company in that last bucket except Comstock Resources — a Haynesville player — has major operations in the Marcellus or Utica.