Ohio Delays Decision to Frack Under Egypt Valley Wildlife Area
Earlier this year, an undisclosed shale driller asked the Ohio Oil and Gas Land Management Commission (OGLMC) to consider opening up an additional 4,360 acres of state-owned Egypt Valley Wildlife Area in Belmont County for shale drilling under the land (see New Request to Frack Under Another 4,743 Acres of OH Wildlife Areas). At a meeting on Monday, May 5, the OGLMC decided to delay a decision on the proposal until a future meeting. However, the May 5 meeting was not without controversy. A Cleveland Plain Dealer reporter tried to confront commission members to ask questions and was turned back by a police officer. The reporter said the officer “grabbed her arm.” A video of the event shows no such thing happening. Read More “Ohio Delays Decision to Frack Under Egypt Valley Wildlife Area”
WhiteHawk Energy is smitten with PHX Minerals. WhiteHawk has been trying to get PHX down the marriage aisle in any way it can for nearly two years. PHX has repeatedly given WhiteHawk the cold shoulder (
A key issue has come about with the rapid increase in carbon capture and sequestration (CCS) projects around the country, including here in the Marcellus/Utica region. Where does one store (sequester) all that carbon dioxide (CO2)? The answer is underground in a Class VI injection well. Class VI wells are a relatively new classification for injection wells, created by the federal EPA in 2010. Earlier this year, the federal EPA bestowed “primacy” on West Virginia, granting the WV Department of Environmental Protection (DEP) the authority to approve new Class VI injection wells, bypassing the federal EPA (see 
In his first two days in office, Joe Biden declared war on the oil and gas industry. One of the first things he did was to revive an interagency working group on the “social cost” of greenhouse gas emissions and directed the issuance of an “interim” cost (see 
We’re catching up on two weeks of changes in the rig count, and wow! Things changed. And NOT in a good way. The national count lost nine rigs over the past two weeks, going from 587 on April 25 to 584 on May 2 and then down to 578 on May 9. But it was the Marcellus/Utica that caught our attention. Two weeks ago, for the May 2 Baker Hughes rig count, Ohio dropped three rigs in a single week, going from 12 on April 25 to nine on May 2. The Ohio count remained at nine on May 9. Consequently, the combined M-U count went from 38 two weeks ago to 35 and has remained at that level. Both Pennsylvania and West Virginia kept their same counts of 18 and 8, respectively. 
Coterra Energy, formed by the merger of Cabot Oil & Gas (drills for natural gas in the Marcellus) and Cimarex Energy (drills for oil in the Permian and Anadarko basins), issued its first quarter 2025 update last week. There was a lot of news coming from the update. However, two things stood out for us: (1) Coterra confirmed that talks to revive the Constitution Pipeline project are underway now, and (2) the company is drilling again in the PA Marcellus and may add another $50 million to 2025’s planned $300 million budget for the Marcellus. 
A few weeks ago, MDN told you that EQT Corporation, the second-largest natural gas producer in the country (and the largest producer in the Marcellus/Utica) is buying out and merging in Olympus Energy for $1.8 billion (see 
In November 2023, CNX Resources CEO Nick DeIuliis signed a voluntary deal with Pennsylvania Gov. Josh Shapiro to expand drilling setbacks and several other regulatory steps not mandated for shale drillers under PA law (see 
During last week’s first quarter update from Williams, management announced a new project called the Transco Power Express expansion. The project will expand Transco capacity by a whopping 950 MMcf/d (nearly a full Bcf) to flow more Marcellus/Utica molecules to the power-hungry Virginia market. The Virginia market is power hungry because of the data centers already built there, and the many more planned for the state. The Power Express project, if built, is expected to go online in the third quarter of 2030 (five years from now). 
Last Thursday, West Virginia Governor Pat Morrisey signed Senate Bill (SB) 627 into law. SB 627 removes the previous ban on leasing “pore spaces” under state-owned parks. However, the bill explicitly prohibits any surface disturbance on state park land for drilling or injection. All lease revenues generated must be used exclusively for improvements and maintenance at the location where the leased pore space is situated. 
In January, MDN reported that the PJM Interconnection electrical grid operator, covering Pennsylvania (along with all or parts of 12 other states and the District of Columbia), had caved to the political demands of PA Gov. Josh Shapiro to artificially cap the prices of the next capacity auction scheduled for July 2025 (see 
Houston, we have a problem. Artificial Intelligence (AI) and the data centers (banks of hundreds or thousands of computers) that support AI are being planned right now. All those data centers need reliable power supplies. Unreliable solar and wind are not up to the task, so the companies building those data centers (like Google, Microsoft, Amazon, Facebook, Apple, and others) are turning to natural gas. Which we love! But here’s the problem: the turbines needed to generate the electricity (turbines that burn natural gas) are now on backorder… until 2028 or later. 
Speaking of gas turbines and our current inability to produce them quickly enough, we came across a somewhat related story from Reuters. The reporters from Reuters are sounding the alarm that U.S. LNG export facilities may soon have to compete for natural gas supplies with power plants needed to power AI data centers. The result is that the price of natural gas will increase, and in some cases, it may not be available for exports. Of course, the free market (capitalism) will sort this out on its own, but in the meantime, there may be some tension. 
The Trump administration recently issued rules that require at least 1% of the natural gas shipped overseas to be carried on U.S.-built tankers, beginning in 2029. The U.S. is the world’s number one global exporter of LNG (liquefied natural gas). However, the U.S. does not build *any* of the specialized LNG cargo carriers used to send that fuel abroad. In a letter to the Trump administration last week, the American Petroleum Institute (API) stated that the oil and gas industry could not comply with the rule and urged Trump officials to reconsider it.