Gas Transmission Work Doubles at Pipeline Builder ESOA
When a pipeline construction contractor tells you its gas transmission work has more than doubled in a single year, that’s not a stock story — that’s a leading indicator. Energy Services of America (Nasdaq: ESOA), the Huntington, WV-based contractor that actually digs the ditches and welds the pipe across Appalachia, reported fiscal third quarter results Monday afternoon. Revenue hit $130.0 million, up 25.5% from $103.6 million a year ago. But the number that matters for our readers is buried in the fine print of the 10-Q: revenue from Gas & Petroleum Transmission work jumped from roughly $9.7 million to $21.2 million — an increase of about 120%. Read More “Gas Transmission Work Doubles at Pipeline Builder ESOA”
The Ohio Department of Natural Resources (ODNR) will ask the state Controlling Board on Monday, August 17, for authority to spend $105 million of oil and gas lease money on Ohio’s wildlife areas — construction, renovation and grants, on a budget line that currently has zero dollars appropriated for the year. It’s the biggest single deployment of shale money since Ohio started leasing public land, and it’s a good moment to revisit what the opposition told Ohioans would happen instead. 
Here we go again. The Bureau of Land Management (BLM) finally issued three permits to drill on Wayne National Forest (WNF) land in Monroe County, Ohio, back in May — the first new drilling permits in Ohio’s only national forest in years. Predictably, the same coalition of green groups that has kept a lid on WNF for the better part of two decades ran straight back to federal court to try to stop them. 
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 
Rochester, NY-based Energy Concepts has unveiled a modular natural gas power system called “Plato5X” that lets AI data centers generate their own electricity, make their own water, cool themselves, and capture 90% of their carbon emissions — without touching the local power grid or municipal water supply. Each 5-megawatt module runs on natural gas and is aimed squarely at the exploding AI/data center market, which is straining power grids and water systems across the country (
The last 18 months have been about as good as it gets for anyone who moves Marcellus and Utica molecules. President Trump’s Executive Order 14154 killed the Biden LNG export pause on day one. FERC rewrote its environmental review procedures in June 2025 to speed things up. And FERC finally drove a stake through Order No. 871, the Biden-era rule that let Big Green freeze construction on an approved pipeline just by filing an appeal (see 
Duke Energy reported second quarter 2026 results Tuesday, and while the earnings themselves are fine-but-boring utility fare, buried in the slide deck is one of the better demand stories going for Marcellus/Utica producers: Duke now has 6,025 megawatts (MW) of new gas-fired generation sited in North and South Carolina, every announced plant has its gas supply under contract, and the two pipelines that will carry most of those molecules south both trace back to Appalachia. 
New York’s Department of Environmental Conservation (DEC) and New York State Energy Research and Development Authority (NYSERDA) announced Wednesday they’ve formally adopted regulations tightening the Regional Greenhouse Gas Initiative (RGGI) — the multi-state carbon tax on coal- and gas-fired power plants — through 2037. The agencies used the words “affordable” or “affordability” six times in their joint announcement. Here’s what they didn’t mention: the price of an RGGI permit jumped 40% in one quarter this year, from $24.99 per ton in March to $35.00 in June. And New York households now pay the third-highest electricity prices in America, behind only Hawaii and California (according to federal data). Six mentions of affordability, zero mentions of the auction price. Funny how that works. 
EOG Resources has settled — and apparently bought out — the Noble County, Ohio landowner who beat it at the Sixth Circuit Court of Appeals last year in a fight over whether a driller can use one owner’s surface to drill horizontally into the neighbors’ minerals. The case, EOG Resources, Inc. v. Lucky Land Management, LLC, produced a published appellate ruling that’s now a go-to precedent on surface rights for horizontal (lateral) drilling anywhere severed mineral estates exist — which describes most of the Marcellus/Utica. MDN first flagged this case a year ago when we caught the 6th Circuit’s reversal (see below) but couldn’t pin down the county or the full backstory (see 
Two months ago, we told you PA Attorney General Dave Sunday had charged Eureka Resources with seven crimes over years of leaking tanks at its Standing Stone plant in Bradford County (see 
Quinnipiac University released a new poll of Pennsylvania registered voters on July 15, and one question in it should worry everyone who makes a living from Marcellus gas. Asked whether they would support or oppose building an AI data center in their community, 74% of Pennsylvania voters said “oppose,” 16% said “support,” and 10% offered no opinion. That’s a jump from Quinnipiac’s February 25 poll, when the split was 68% opposed and 20% in favor. The opposition is bipartisan — 64% of Republicans, 82% of Democrats, and 77% of independents all said no thanks. Three-quarters of voters (76%) say they’re following data center news either very closely (26%) or somewhat closely (50%). And Gov. Josh Shapiro isn’t getting credit either: just 24% approve of how he’s handling data centers in Pennsylvania, while 34% disapprove and a whopping 42% have no opinion. The survey polled 895 registered voters July 9-13, with a margin of error of +/- 4.3 percentage points. 
Williams dropped its second quarter 2026 results after the close on Monday, August 3, and held the analyst call Tuesday morning. The headline numbers are good: adjusted EBITDA of $1.921 billion (up 6%), GAAP net income of $827 million (up 51%), and a raised full-year guidance midpoint of $8.4 billion. Wall Street liked it. But the story for MDN readers isn’t in the headline. It’s buried in the volume tables on page 8 of the release, in a capital spending line nobody read out loud, and in two new Transco projects in Pennsylvania and New Jersey that got about eleven seconds of airtime on the call. 
The long, sad saga of Eureka Resources has a new chapter — and for once, it’s not another fine or another leak. Eureka has sold the business operations at all three of its shuttered Pennsylvania frack wastewater treatment plants. Two of the three went to Select Water Solutions, one of the biggest water-management companies in the oilfield. The third went to a Washington County trucking outfit. We didn’t hear this from Eureka. We heard it from the Middle Susquehanna Riverkeeper Association, which pried the details out of the PA Department of Environmental Protection (DEP) in advance of the one-year anniversary of the Aug. 17, 2025 spill that dumped 16,000 gallons of untreated wastewater into the West Branch of the Susquehanna River (see 
Back in January 2022, we brought you what looked like a milestone: the WV Dept. of Environmental Protection had issued a construction permit for a big Marcellus gas-fired power plant next door to the Longview coal plant in Maidsville, Monongalia County (see