M-U Spot Gas Hits 2-Year Low as Cove Point Goes Dark
Appalachian spot natural gas prices just fell off a cliff. Texas Eastern M-2 — the benchmark hub for Marcellus/Utica gas — dropped 41.5 cents to average $1.245/MMBtu for weekend and Monday deliveries, with some trades printing as low as $1.020, according to NGI (Natural Gas Intelligence). Eastern Gas North shed 44.5 cents to $1.195. Six regional hubs traded at their lowest prices since November 2024. Two things did the damage at the same time: Cove Point LNG shut down for annual maintenance Saturday, and a sharp cool-down swept the eastern U.S., taking a big bite out of air-conditioning demand. Read More “M-U Spot Gas Hits 2-Year Low as Cove Point Goes Dark”
Big Green’s second legal attack against Transco’s Southeast Supply Enhancement Project (SESE) just fired its opening shot. On September 18, Sierra Club, Appalachian Voices, Southern Alliance for Clean Energy, and 7 Directions of Service filed their 142-page opening brief in the D.C. Circuit (Case No. 26-1100), arguing FERC’s approval of the pipeline was “arbitrary and capricious” because the agency allegedly ignored evidence that SESE and a second, co-located pipeline would combine to inflict “severe and potentially permanent” damage on streams across Virginia and North Carolina. Construction on SESE has continued the entire time — including through a failed bid by the same groups to freeze it back in June. 
The U.S. Chemical Safety and Hazard Investigation Board (CSB) last Wednesday, Sept. 16, released its final report on the June 4, 2025, explosion and fire at Shell Polymers Monaca, the ethane cracker plant in Beaver County, PA (see 
The Pittsburgh Tribune-Review (via the TribLive website) ran a big Saturday feature arguing that Western Pennsylvania’s drilling rebound is being driven by the data center boom. The legwork is real — five township officials, two activist groups, a CNX executive, a Pitt professor. The framing isn’t. The story gives readers three different answers to “how many wells does Pennsylvania have,” gets the cause of last year’s drilling backward, and then, twelve hundred words in, quietly disproves its own headline. 
A small liquefied natural gas (LNG) plant in Medley, Florida — just outside Miami — is now trucking rocket fuel up the peninsula to Cape Canaveral. Sawgrass LNG & Power announced last Thursday that it has begun supplying LNG to an unnamed “aerospace customer” at the Cape, with the first deliveries completed in August. We’ve written about this plant before, and the interesting question for MDN readers is the same one we asked in April 2025: are any of those molecules ours? 
Columbia Gas Transmission (a TC Energy company) has asked federal regulators for permission to permanently walk away from three underground natural gas storage fields straddling the Pennsylvania/West Virginia line near Majorsville — plugging 71 wells, tearing out a compressor station, and abandoning nearly 20 miles of pipe. On September 9, FERC set the clock on its environmental review. If you’re a landowner in Greene or Washington County, PA, or Marshall County, WV, this one lands in your backyard. Here’s the plain-English version of a very technical filing. 
In a companion post today, we told you that of 22 proposed data center campuses in Northeastern Pennsylvania, exactly one plans to build its own gas-fired power (see Only 1 of 22 NEPA Data Centers Plans Its Own Gas Plant). The Pittsburgh Post-Gazette hands us the mirror image. Reporter Anya Litvak counted 10 new natural gas power plants proposed within an hour’s drive of Pittsburgh — more than 20 gigawatts (GW) of new capacity, most of it chasing data center demand, all of it aimed at the next five years. Pennsylvania’s entire existing generating fleet, every power plant and wind turbine and solar panel in the state, adds up to about 45 GW. Southwestern PA alone is proposing to add 22 GW. That is not an expansion. That is a second Pennsylvania grid. 
DeepRock Disposal Solutions wants two of its Noble County, Ohio, injection wells back in service — and the Ohio Department of Natural Resources (ODNR) keeps saying no. ODNR’s Division of Oil and Gas Resources Management shut the Travis and Warren wells in January 2023, blaming them for a 2021 brine eruption that cost the state $1.28 million to clean up. DeepRock argued its case at a hearing in April. It lost. The division chief issued a fresh order on July 31 continuing the suspension, and on Aug. 28 DeepRock appealed to the Ohio Oil and Gas Commission. Here’s the part our readers should circle on the calendar: under Ohio Administrative Code, DeepRock has 120 days from that July 31 order — until roughly Nov. 28 (our count) — to submit a plan fixing what the division found, or plug both wells permanently. 
Precision Drilling, the Calgary-based rig contractor that says it’s the #2 drilling company-for-hire in the Marcellus, announced on Sept. 16 that it will keep buying back its own stock for another year. Yawn, right? Stick with us. The buyback is the boring part. The interesting part is the investor presentation Precision put out this month, which lays out why the company thinks gas drilling for LNG exports will keep its rigs busy for years, and why the price of renting a rig is heading up. 
Shale Insight 2026
It finally happened. Chord Energy, the Bakken-focused driller that inherited a big non-operated slice of the northeast Pennsylvania (NEPA) Marcellus when it bought Enerplus in 2024, has found a buyer. That buyer is POSCO International, the trading and energy arm of South Korean steel giant POSCO. The price is $550 million. MDN first told you in February 2025 that Chord was thinking about selling this asset, and in July 2025 that it was actively shopping it (see links below). The deal covers approximately 32,000 net acres and trailing 12-month (TTM) production of approximately 121 MMcf/d (MMcf/d means million cubic feet per day). The gas is all “residue” gas, meaning dry gas with no NGLs (natural gas liquids like ethane and propane). 
NextEra Energy took its $13 billion, 3,750-megawatt (MW) East Riverside Energy Center to the people on Tuesday night, and the people showed up. Hundreds of Fayette County residents filled Brownsville Area High School for their first look at what would be one of the largest gas-fired power plants in the country. They got poster boards, experts to chat with, and a five-minute slideshow every hour. What they didn’t get was a microphone for questions. We picked up a few new details, including one that producers and pipeline companies should read twice. 
The Upper Burrell Township (Westmoreland County, PA) Planning Commission hit the pause button Tuesday on recommending the township’s latest draft data center ordinance. The delay gives residents time to email their wish lists to supervisors before an Oct. 7 meeting. Supervisors hope to pass the ordinance at a special meeting in October, ahead of the Nov. 2 end of their data center moratorium, and Westmoreland County gets a say, too. The rules won’t touch TECfusions’ existing operations at the former Alcoa/Arconic campus, but they would govern new development there. Buried in the 26-page draft is a line that should make every Marcellus/Utica (M-U) driller and landowner sit up: every new data center must supply its own baseload power. And the township says its next project is writing rules for power plants. 
Four months after pulling the trigger on its $13 billion Commonwealth LNG export plant in Cameron Parish, Louisiana (see