Will Ohio’s New Governor Harm the Utica Shale Industry?
On Tuesday, Ohio voters elected Democrat Dr. Amy Acton, the state’s former health director, as their next governor. She takes office Jan. 11. Acton campaigned on ending fracking under state parks and wildlife areas and on a three-year freeze on fracking wastewater injection in Washington County. So, what can she actually do to the Utica industry once she’s in charge? A new Cleveland Plain Dealer story looks at the state-lands piece of that question (short answer: not as much as she promised). We dug into the rest. Bottom line: she can’t ban fracking. But a governor has a lot of ways to make life slow, expensive, and miserable for drillers if she wants to. Read More “Will Ohio’s New Governor Harm the Utica Shale Industry?”
PJM Interconnection, which runs the power grid for 67 million people in 13 states (including PA, OH and WV) and D.C., issued its winter outlook yesterday. The short version: the lights should stay on this winter, even though PJM expects demand to set a new winter record. But a slide deck PJM presented to its Operating Committee the same day shows how thin the cushion gets if the wind stops blowing and a big gas supply problem hits at the same time. And it shows, once again, which fuel carries the load: natural gas. 
How much of Pennsylvania is a so-called “environmental justice” (EJ) area? We get that question from readers, and frankly, we’ve never had a solid answer. In 2023, then-DEP Secretary Rich Negrin said he thought “75% of Pennsylvania” would end up as EJ communities, and MDN repeated that number. So we went to DEP’s own mapping tool, 
The word we’re seeing most this morning is “bloodbath,” and it fits. Democrats flipped both the U.S. House and U.S. Senate in yesterday’s midterm elections, only the fifth time since World War II that a party has flipped both chambers in a midterm. President Trump keeps his veto pen for two more years, so the fossil-friendly policies coming out of his agencies aren’t going anywhere soon. But the shale and LNG industries just lost a lot of friends on Capitol Hill, and maybe their best shot at federal permitting reform in a generation. Here’s what happened, why, and what it means for drillers, pipeliners, LNG exporters, and the landowners who depend on them. 
More Marcellus wells are on the way in Pine Creek country. On October 20, the Pennsylvania Department of Environmental Protection (DEP) issued EQT ARO LLC a permit to build about 4.6 miles of 10-inch gas line through Cummings and Watson townships in western Lycoming County, starting at a well pad on a state forest tract. DEP’s notice in last Saturday’s Pennsylvania Bulletin says the line is “for the purpose of Marcellus Shale well development.” The same issue shows Pennsylvania General Energy (PGE) picking up a new earthmoving permit one township over. Pine Creek is open for business. 
Last Wednesday, U.S. Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy announced that the Pipeline and Hazardous Materials Safety Administration (PHMSA) has proposed the first top-to-bottom rewrite of federal LNG facility safety rules in more than two decades. Most of the coverage, and most of the projected savings, centers on the giant LNG export terminals along the Gulf Coast. But the Marcellus/Utica has its own LNG industry: peak-shaving plants that keep the gas flowing on the coldest days of winter, plus small liquefaction plants fed by local shale gas. The 236-page proposal touches our corner of the LNG world in several ways, some good and one worth watching. Here’s what’s in it and what it means for the region. 
Welcome to a new weekly MDN feature. Every Saturday, the Pennsylvania Bulletin (the state’s official gazette) publishes page after page of permit applications and approvals from the Department of Environmental Protection (DEP). Most of it covers sewage plants, quarries, and crematories. But buried in there is a steady trickle of shale-related permits: new well pad air permits, earthmoving permits for pads and pipelines, renewals, and spill cleanups. We read it so you don’t have to. Last week’s edition (Oct 31, Vol. 56, No. 44) ran 256 pages. Here’s what matters to the shale crowd. 
The Pennsylvania Department of Environmental Protection (DEP) says it plans to approve the air permit for Aligned Data Centers’ giant “Project Phoenix” campus at the former Bruce Mansfield coal plant site in Shippingport (Beaver County, PA). The campus will run on Marcellus/Utica natural gas, but it won’t burn the gas. Aligned plans to make its own electricity with solid oxide fuel cells, which turn gas into power through a chemical reaction instead of combustion. DEP published its notice in Saturday’s Pennsylvania Bulletin and scheduled a public hearing for Thursday, December 3, in Shippingport. Get the popcorn ready. 
Big Green group FracTracker Alliance, with partner Buckeye Environmental Network (BEN), has released a new report claiming Ohio logged 2,529 oil and gas “incidents” from 2015 through 2025, and that incidents are “rising” while oversight is “lax.” The Ohio Capital Journal ran with the big number without checking it. But here’s the thing: if you actually read FracTracker’s own charts (we did, all 31 pages), they tell a very different story. Shale wells account for less than 8% of the incidents. Serious incidents fell more than 80%. And the “rise” is almost entirely in records that state regulators didn’t even rate as “minor.” Let’s set the record straight…
Round two. A month after FERC accepted PJM Interconnection’s one-time “emergency” power auction for data centers and then froze it for five months (see 
The Marcellus Shale Coalition (MSC) is leading a three-state push by Appalachian drillers to get the Bipartisan American Affordability and Jobs Act (BAAJA, S. 5653) over the finish line. The timing is no accident. When the U.S. Senate returns from its campaign break on Monday, November 9, the first thing it will do is take a make-or-break procedural vote on this permitting reform bill. Here’s where things stand: who’s lined up for it, who’s lined up against it, and why a bill about paperwork matters to every landowner and driller in the Marcellus/Utica. 
In August, MDN told you about two federal lawsuits, filed six days apart by Big Green groups, aimed at killing Nationwide Permit 12 (NWP 12). That’s the Army Corps of Engineers permit that lets pipelines cross streams and wetlands without a separate federal review at every single crossing (see 
Mike Rowe, of “Dirty Jobs” fame, sat down with EQT CEO Toby Rice for a 77-minute episode of his podcast, 
Wait a minute. Didn’t the EPA already fix the Biden-era “Quad O” methane regs? Back in April, MDN told you the EPA had issued a final Quad O rule (see 
National Fuel Gas (NFG) is laying more pipe in Tioga County. Its gathering subsidiary, NFG Midstream Covington, has asked the PA Department of Environmental Protection (DEP) for a stream-and-wetland crossing permit for two natural gas pipelines, 24-inch and 20-inch, running side by side through Farmington, Deerfield, and Chatham townships. The notice also mentions a 16-inch water line. The filing comes just 10 days after NFG’s board approved splitting the company in two, and it strongly suggests NFG’s Seneca Resources drilling arm is gearing up for more Utica production in Tioga County.