EIA Traces 250 Years of U.S. Energy Use: From Firewood to Fracking
Every so often the U.S. Energy Information Administration (EIA) publishes something that deserves to be printed out and taped to the wall. This is one of those. To mark America’s 250th, EIA charted the entire history of U.S. energy consumption — from 1776 firewood to 2025 shale gas — and two Pennsylvania milestones show up along the way: Edwin Drake’s first commercial oil well at Titusville in 1859, and the nation’s first full-scale commercial nuclear plant, which came online in the Keystone State in 1957. Read More “EIA Traces 250 Years of U.S. Energy Use: From Firewood to Fracking”
Kimmeridge, the so-called “activist investor” that spent the past year leaning on Coterra Energy (and then Devon Energy) to dump its northeast Pennsylvania Marcellus assets, has just published a sequel to its 2024 “Shale’s Golden Years” white paper. The new paper, “Shale’s Golden Years, Part II: The Cost of Aging,” comes to a conclusion that should make Marcellus/Utica drillers (and landowners) smile: The oil side of shale is aging badly, while the natural gas side remains healthy, abundant, and capital-efficient. The rub? Kimmeridge says gas is so abundant that gas drillers need to move “downstream” to squeeze more value out of each molecule than Henry Hub will pay. 
The Ohio Department of Natural Resources (ODNR) recently released second-quarter 2026 production numbers. The state’s top natural gas producer was Ascent Resources, with 220,554,117 Mcf (220.55 Bcf) produced during the quarter, averaging 2.42 Bcf/d. Ascent’s production accounted for 41% of the state’s natural gas production. The top oil producer in the state, by far, was EOG Resources, which reports under two names: EOG Ohio LLC (the old Encino Energy assets EOG bought last year) and EOG Resources Inc. Together, they produced 8,846,396 barrels of oil during the quarter, which works out to an average of 97,213 barrels per day. That’s 67% (two-thirds!) of Ohio’s entire oil production during 2Q26. 
Remember Synapse Energy Economics? That’s the Massachusetts consulting outfit that, back in 2023, was paid by two Big Green groups to produce a “report” claiming Pennsylvania’s RGGI carbon tax would lower your electric bill (see 
A Syracuse University professor has published a paper in the Journal of the American Planning Association (JAPA) urging towns to treat AI data centers the way they treated fracking a decade ago. Syracuse’s PR department is billing it as “new research” that shows communities how to handle data centers. There’s just one problem. It isn’t really research—by the author’s own admission, no new data was collected. And several of the “facts” about fracking it leans on are flat wrong, especially about Pennsylvania. 
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. 
Pennsylvania’s utility regulators just told the General Assembly what Marcellus drillers have been saying for two years: the electricity business is about to get very busy, and natural gas is going to be the one doing the heavy lifting. On Tuesday, September 1, the Pennsylvania Public Utility Commission (PUC) released its annual Electric Power Outlook for Pennsylvania, this one covering 2025 through 2030. The report is required by state law — the PUC has to collect demand forecasts from the state’s 11 electric distribution companies (EDCs, the utilities that run the poles and wires to your house) and hand a summary to the Legislature and the Governor every September. Usually it’s a snoozer. Not this year. 
Yesterday, the Pennsylvania Independent Fiscal Office (IFO) released its quarterly Natural Gas Production Report covering April through June 2026 (full copy below). Three numbers, all pointing in the same direction: PA drillers spudded (started drilling) 89 new horizontal wells in 2Q26, down 16 wells (-15.2%) from the 105 spudded in 2Q25. Production volume was 1,925 billion cubic feet (Bcf), down 32 Bcf (-1.6%) from 1,957 Bcf in 2Q25 — the lowest quarterly volume since 4Q24. And the average Pennsylvania spot hub price was $2.11 per MMBtu, down 27 cents (-11.3%) from last year’s $2.38. 
A new report from two respected energy economists puts a number on something MDN readers have watched play out all year: PJM’s capacity market is broken, and it’s about to cost ratepayers billions — while creating a wide-open lane for reliable Marcellus/Utica gas. The National Center for Energy Analytics (NCEA) published “Regional Transmission Organizations: Problem or Solution?” on August 27. Authors Jonathan A. Lesser (president, Continental Economics) and Brent Bennett (policy director, Life:Powered/Texas Public Policy Foundation) dig into why RTOs (Regional Transmission Organizations) like PJM — the grid operator covering all or part of 13 mid-Atlantic states, including Pennsylvania, Ohio, and West Virginia — are struggling to keep the lights on at a price anyone wants to pay.
A new report from Global Energy Monitor (GEM) — a group that says it exists “in support of the worldwide movement for clean energy” — was written to sound an alarm about a runaway natural gas buildout. Buried in one of its charts is the best news Appalachian landowners have gotten all year. Pennsylvania, Ohio, and West Virginia together added almost exactly as much new gas-fired power capacity in the first six months of 2026 as the entire state of Texas. 
The International Gas Union (IGU), Snam, and Rystad Energy released the 2026 Global Gas Report this morning (full copy below), and there’s one line in it Marcellus/Utica readers shouldn’t skip past. The record 4,147 billion cubic meters (bcm) of natural gas the world produced last year was driven, in the report’s words, overwhelmingly by North America — and the three basins it names are the Permian, the Haynesville, and Appalachia. That’s us. A bcm, by the way, is a billion cubic meters, or roughly 35.3 billion cubic feet (Bcf). North America’s 54 bcm of added supply works out to about 1.9 trillion cubic feet, or a little over 5 Bcf/d of new gas in a single year. 