Ohio Sheds a Rig, M-U Falls to 34; National Count Holds at 588
The Marcellus/Utica finally moved last week — in the wrong direction. Ohio dropped a rig, taking the M-U to 34 and ending a three-week stall at 35. Nationally, the count didn’t budge at all, holding at 588. But that flat number hides something: oil rigs fell five while gas rigs gained five, and not one of those new gas rigs showed up here. Frac spreads slipped again too, down four to 180 — the second straight weekly decline. Read More “Ohio Sheds a Rig, M-U Falls to 34; National Count Holds at 588”
Ohio pumped roughly 2 trillion cubic feet of natural gas out of the ground last year, most of it from the Utica Shale. And yet 43 families in Washington County are being told to find another way to heat their homes by October 29 — because the wells that feed their gas line are running out of gas. The Marietta Times and the Parkersburg News & Sentinel both reported last week that Knox Energy has notified 43 customers in the Belpre area that their natural gas service ends October 29. The reason isn’t a billing dispute or a rate case. It’s geology. 
The Marcellus/Utica region received 19 new drilling permits last week, August 17 – 23, down from the 27 permits issued two weeks ago. For the second week in a row, Pennsylvania issued the fewest new permits, with 2 (after issuing just 4 two weeks ago). What’s up with PA? Ohio issued 4 permits. And West Virginia took the prize last week, issuing 13 new permits. The drillers who received new permits were: Expand Energy (6), Infinity Natural Resources (1), Northeast Natural Energy (1), Pennsylvania General Energy (2), Tiburon Oil & Gas (3), and Vickery Energy (6). 
The PJM market monitor asked federal regulators to kill Hull Street Energy’s purchase of two gas-fired peaking plants unless Hull Street promised not to point them at data centers. On August 13, FERC said no — and said the monitor hadn’t supported its argument. Thirteen days later, the deal closed. Hull Street Energy (HSE), a private equity firm in the Washington, D.C. area, announced yesterday that it completed the acquisition of the Lee County Generating Station in Dixon, Illinois, and the Tait Electric Generating Station near Dayton, Ohio, from Rockland Capital. HSE calls the pair the “GridFlex Portfolio” and has folded it into Milepost Power, its thermal generation platform. 
Score one for the good guys. The Ohio Power Siting Board (OPSB) voted yesterday (Aug. 20) to hand Chestnut Run Energy LLC its Certificate of Environmental Compatibility and Public Need — the golden ticket needed to build a 1,300-megawatt (MW), $2 billion natural gas-fired power plant in Washington Township, Carroll County. That’s smack in the middle of Utica Shale country. MDN first told you about this project back in April (see 
The Columbus Dispatch — a paper based 120 miles northwest of the action — parachuted into Marietta, Ohio, yesterday with a long story about shale wastewater injection wells that leads with the words “radioactive,” “toxic,” and “Russian roulette,” and waits ten paragraphs to tell readers the one fact that matters most: no evidence of drinking water contamination has turned up. Not now. Not in 15 years. We’ve covered this fight since 2025, and we’ll say again what we said in July — there IS a real problem here, but it isn’t the one the Dispatch is selling. 
It’s official. In June, we told you OpenAI was in “advanced negotiations” to lease the gargantuan 10-gigawatt (GW) data center campus rising on federal land in Piketon (Pike County), Ohio (see 
Something happened over the past ten days that ought to look awfully familiar to anyone who was around Marcellus country in 2009. A single advocacy shop dug a permit out of a state filing cabinet, handed it to a friendly reporter at the New York Times, and within a week roughly two dozen outlets were running the same three sentences about Amazon becoming “the largest single source of pollution in the United States.” It’s not a coincidence, it’s not organic, and it’s not staying in Texas. Big Green has told us, in print, that the data center fight is the anti-fracking playbook run a second time — and one of the projects already on their list belongs to Williams, in Ohio, burning Utica gas. 
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A unanimous Ohio Supreme Court has ordered the tiny Pickaway County village of Ashville to let voters decide the fate of a data center and natural gas power plant — a project the village council tried to fast-track by declaring it an “emergency” not subject to a public vote. The court didn’t buy it. But before opponents celebrate too hard, the ruling doesn’t guarantee a vote will actually happen this November — county election officials still get to decide whether the deal is even the kind of thing voters can weigh in on at all. 
Babcock & Wilcox — the 159-year-old boiler maker headquartered in Akron, Ohio — announced yesterday that it signed an agreement with Siemens Energy to start work on 20 steam turbine generator sets totaling 1 gigawatt (GW) of capacity for gas-fired data center projects. Here’s the part that caught our eye: B&W hasn’t announced signed customers for all of them. The company is buying the factory slots first and lining up buyers second. That’s a real bet on gas-fired power demand — and it’s being made by a company sitting right on top of the Utica. 
One of the biggest landowner-vs.-driller cases in Ohio shale history just ended — with no verdict, no dollar figure, and a two-page piece of paper. On July 29, a group of Belmont County mineral owners and Rice Drilling D LLC (owned by EQT) jointly asked a federal judge to throw out the case for good, roughly two months after it was supposed to go in front of a jury. Eight years, 580 docket entries, and one of the most consequential lease questions in the Utica — settled behind closed doors.