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?”
Gulfport Energy, one of the largest drillers in the Ohio Utica, issued its third-quarter 2026 update this week, and it was a solid one. Total production averaged 1,057.2 MMcfe/d (million cubic feet equivalent per day), up about 10% from the second quarter, while liquids production (oil, condensate and NGLs) jumped 67% to 23.5 Mbbl/d (thousand barrels per day). But the bigger news is where CEO Nick Dell’Osso, now five months into the job after being shown the door at Expand Energy, is steering the company: a continuous two-rig drilling program in Ohio starting in 2027, an electric frac fleet, less spending in Oklahoma, another premium-priced gas sales deal into the Midwest, and a fatter $2.0 billion stock buyback authorization. 
Ascent Resources, the largest natural gas producer in Ohio’s Utica Shale and one of the largest privately held drillers in the U.S., issued its third-quarter 2026 update yesterday. For the first time since early 2025, Ascent posted a loss: $22.8 million. Don’t panic. The red ink comes from one item: a $185.2 million charge to exit pipeline space it didn’t need. Under the hood, production held steady at 2,190 MMcfe/d (2.19 Bcfe/d), free cash flow more than doubled from 2Q, and Ascent raised its production guidance. The bigger stories for MDN readers: Ascent cut its rig count in half, slowed down its leasing, and its accountants dropped the odds of an IPO or sale to just 15%. 
Yesterday, Ohio voters had their first big chance to vote directly on data centers, and the data centers got clobbered. There were 21 data center ballot measures in 18 Ohio towns, villages, and townships (more than half of the 41 on ballots across the country). Voters in at least 14 of those places passed bans or new restrictions, most of them by margins of roughly 3-to-1 or 4-to-1. For MDN readers, the biggest single loss came in tiny Ashville (Pickaway County, just south of Columbus). There, about 82% of voters struck down the village’s deal with EdgeConneX for two data centers and an on-site gas-fired power plant of up to 800 megawatts (MW). Below are the scorecard, the gas angle, who’s behind the bans, and what comes next. 
Four days before Ohioans pick their next governor, Rolling Stone and the climate activist website DeSmog published a story by anti-fossil writer Justin Nobel under the headline “Ohio Denies Evidence of Fracking Waste in Drinking Water. Its Own Records Show Otherwise.” We read every word. The state’s records show no such thing. What they show is one salty water well in Coshocton County that the Ohio Department of Natural Resources (ODNR) investigated in 2021 and traced to a naturally salty layer of rock. Much of the rest is opinion from activists and a water well driller, plus a candidate’s campaign promise. Here’s what the story gets wrong, and what it leaves out. 
The Marcellus/Utica region received 9 new shale well permits last week, Oct. 19 – 25, down 3 from 12 the week before. Pennsylvania issued 4 new permits, Ohio issued 4, and West Virginia issued 1. The drillers who received new-well permits last week were: Antero Resources, Gulfport, INR, JKLM Energy, and Snyder Brothers. It was a quieter week on the new-permit front. The busiest driller of all, EOG Resources, didn’t get a single permit for a brand-new well — but it did get seven permits to tweak wells it was already approved to drill in Ohio (more on that below). 
Antero Midstream (AM) has a new pipeline on the drawing board. During Thursday’s 3Q26 earnings call, CEO Michael Kennedy said AM wants to build a North-South pipeline from Antero Resources’ West Virginia field north to the Clarington, Ohio, market. Kennedy said AM is “scoping it right now” and spending “a little initial capital” to assess it, and that “you’ll probably see us FID that in 2027.” (FID means final investment decision, the point where a company commits to build.) There was no press release. The news came out in answer to a question from a Goldman Sachs analyst. 
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…
Ohio’s state-land leasing program has a new target. A driller (whose name is kept secret by state law, for now) has asked the Ohio Oil and Gas Land Management Commission (OGLMC) to open about 618 acres under the Monroe Lake Wildlife Area in Monroe County to shale drilling. Public comments are open through Nov. 30. The twist this time? Because of the calendar, the final call may land on the desk of whoever wins next month’s race for governor. 
Last month we told you Ohio had asked PJM to dust off the “State Agreement Approach,” a grid-planning tool invented for New Jersey’s offshore wind, and use it instead for the $4.2 billion in power lines feeding the 10-gigawatt SoftBank data center and gas plant complex at Piketon (see 
Here’s a story you won’t read anywhere else. Strata Petroleum, LLC buys oil and gas mineral rights, and it has quietly sold its mineral interests in 116 producing Ohio Utica wells to Dallas-based Rising Phoenix Royalties. The deal closed effective October 5. Strata managing partner Justin Wainwright reached out to MDN with the news. He won’t disclose the exact price, but he told us it was “well into 7 figures.” The wells are operated by two of the biggest names in the Ohio Utica, EOG Resources and Ascent Resources, and they’re spread across six of the play’s core counties. Strata says it isn’t leaving the region. It plans to keep buying minerals across Ohio, West Virginia, and Pennsylvania. 
A coalition of 26 state attorneys general, led by West Virginia AG JB McCuskey, is urging the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission (FERC) to adopt a proposed rule that would let interstate pipelines do bigger upgrades, faster, without FERC’s full project-by-project review. All three Republican AGs in our neck of the woods signed on: West Virginia’s McCuskey, Pennsylvania’s Dave Sunday, and Ohio’s D. Andrew Wilson. The 24-page comment letter, dated Oct. 6, is a point-by-point rebuttal to a blue-state coalition (New York, Maryland, Massachusetts, California, and friends) that wants FERC to scrap the whole idea. It’s a wonky fight over a wonky program, but it matters a great deal to drillers, pipeline companies, and royalty owners in the Marcellus/Utica.