39 New Shale Well Permits Reported for PA-OH-WV Aug 24 – 30
The Marcellus/Utica region received 39 new drilling permits last week, August 24 – 30, up significantly from the 19 permits issued two weeks ago. Pennsylvania finally bounced back, issuing the vast majority of the new permits, with 25. Ohio issued 8 permits. And West Virginia issued 6 new permits. The drillers who received new permits were: Antero Resources, Campbell Oil & Gas, CNX Resources, EOG Resources, EQT, Expand Energy, Infinity Natural Resources, PennEnergy Resources, and Repsol Oil & Gas. Read More “39 New Shale Well Permits Reported for PA-OH-WV Aug 24 – 30”

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 