Shale Permits Dip to 9 Last Week; Gulfport, Snyder Bros Lead the Way
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). Read More “Shale Permits Dip to 9 Last Week; Gulfport, Snyder Bros Lead the Way”

DeepRock Disposal Solutions wants two of its Noble County, Ohio, injection wells back in service — and the Ohio Department of Natural Resources (ODNR) keeps saying no. ODNR’s Division of Oil and Gas Resources Management shut the Travis and Warren wells in January 2023, blaming them for a 2021 brine eruption that cost the state $1.28 million to clean up. DeepRock argued its case at a hearing in April. It lost. The division chief issued a fresh order on July 31 continuing the suspension, and on Aug. 28 DeepRock appealed to the Ohio Oil and Gas Commission. Here’s the part our readers should circle on the calendar: under Ohio Administrative Code, DeepRock has 120 days from that July 31 order — until roughly Nov. 28 (our count) — to submit a plan fixing what the division found, or plug both wells permanently.
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
Last May, MDN brought you the news that the Ohio Department of Natural Resources (ODNR) was laying the blame for a series of low-level earthquakes in southeastern Ohio on fracking at a shale well in Noble County (see
Just coming to light for us is a lawsuit filed in June 2025 seeking to hold DeepRock Disposal Solutions responsible for the $1.28 million cleanup of a 2021 environmental incident in Noble County. The incident involved fracking brine migrating from a DeepRock injection well into the inactive Gant Well, triggering a massive eruption that contaminated local waterways and killed a couple of hundred fish and salamanders (see
Volatility is the watchword for new permits in the Marcellus/Utica. Three weeks ago, the combined count between Pennsylvania, Ohio, and West Virginia was a measly 8 new permits (see