Antero Resources | Ascent Resources | Beech Resources | Bradford County | Doddridge County | Energy Companies | Expand Energy | Harrison County | Lycoming County | Noble County | Ohio | Pennsylvania | Range Resources Corp | Washington County | Weekly Permits | West Virginia | Wetzel County
16 New Shale Well Permits Reported for PA-OH-WV Sep 21 – 27
The Marcellus/Utica region received 16 new drilling permits last week, September 21 – 27, down 1 from the 17 permits issued two weeks ago. Pennsylvania issued 6 of the new permits. Ohio also issued 1 new permit. And West Virginia issued 9 new permits. The drillers who received new permits last week were: Antero Resources, Ascent Resources, Beech Resources, Expand Energy, and Range Resources. Read More “16 New Shale Well Permits Reported for PA-OH-WV Sep 21 – 27”
Sunday (two weeks ago) was a two-for-one day on television for anyone following the data center fight. CBS’s 60 Minutes ran a 13-minute segment from Texas showing just how furious rural Americans have become about the AI buildout landing in their backyards. Hours earlier on Fox & Friends Weekend, Ohio gubernatorial candidate Vivek Ramaswamy laid out a plan that, frankly, answers nearly every complaint 60 Minutes aired. Watch them back-to-back (both are embedded below), and you get the problem and the solution in about 25 minutes. 
Susan Vessels, the Republican (we use that term loosely) president of Marietta, OH City Council, has endorsed Democrat Amy Acton for governor of Ohio. Why? Because Acton promised to honor Marietta’s call for a three-year moratorium on new wastewater injection wells. Vessels is so fixated on blocking injection wells that she’s willing to hand the governor’s office — and control of the agency that regulates Ohio’s oil and gas industry — to the woman who, as Ohio’s health director in 2020, signed the order that shut down the state. That’s not a Republican. That’s a RINO (Republican In Name Only). 
Meta’s energy chief closed 
A year and a day after the Farnsworth #4 orphan well blew out and burned six people inside Ohio’s Wayne National Forest, one of the survivors went to court. Chazz Bates — a 20-year-old rig hand at the time — filed suit Aug. 21 in Washington County Common Pleas Court against his own employer, Monroe Drilling Operations LLC, and the cementing subcontractor on the job, Zanesville-based Formation Cementing Inc. The complaint, which also names 10 unidentified “John Doe” defendants, alleges the two companies skipped basic well control before pumping cement into a well nobody had pressure-tested — and that an ODNR inspector had flagged Monroe Drilling’s homemade wellhead as leaking and inadequate two months before the explosion. 
Three weeks. Same number. The Marcellus/Utica sat at 33 rigs again for the week ended September 18, while the national count added four to reach 595—a fresh 52-week high, topping the 593 we charted on August 14. Oil rigs up. Gas rigs up. Frac spreads up. And WTI closed at $100.74 a barrel with Henry Hub at $2.91. Everything in this report moved except the Marcellus/Utica. 
It’s a sellout, and we now have the full scorecard. On Tuesday, the Bureau of Land Management (BLM) auctioned drilling rights to 40 parcels of federal minerals under Ohio’s Wayne National Forest (WNF), and every parcel found a buyer. The 2,776.84 acres in Monroe and Washington counties brought $11,097,693 in total receipts. Five companies won leases, and one of them, Apex Energy Operating III LLC, walked off with nearly two-thirds of the acreage. We have BLM’s full parcel-by-parcel results, embedded below. It’s the first federal lease sale in the WNF since March 2017. 
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. 
Texas is still the undisputed king of American natural gas — but Pennsylvania, West Virginia, and Ohio together produced almost as much gas in 2025 as Texas did all by itself. New EIA data confirms Appalachia is America’s second major shale gas hub, and it’s not particularly close behind. The U.S. Energy Information Administration’s annual gross withdrawals table shows the country produced 47.73 Tcf of natural gas in 2025 (gross withdrawals — the total wellhead volume before processing, as distinct from marketed or dry gas figures). Texas alone accounted for 13,603 Bcf, or 28.5% of the U.S. total — nearly double Pennsylvania’s 7,676 Bcf (16.1%). 
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. 
The Ohio River Valley Institute (ORVI), the radical anti-fossil fuel outfit that wants to shut down Appalachian shale, is at it again. Today ORVI senior researcher Sean O’Leary published an op-ed in the Ohio Capital Journal claiming that shale’s importance to Ohio’s economy is “small and shrinking.” He lists seven “facts.” We checked every one of them against the same government data he cites. Some are technically true but badly misleading. At least one is flat wrong — by a factor of a million. Here’s what the data actually says. 
Eastern Gas Transmission and Storage (EGTS), a wholly owned subsidiary of Berkshire Hathaway Energy (Warren Buffett’s company), got the last piece of paper it needed yesterday for an important new pipeline project. FERC’s Office of Energy Projects issued a notice to proceed (NTP) on Sept. 10, authorizing EGTS to start building the Appalachian Reliability Project (ARP) — the 550,000 dekatherms/day expansion that will push more Marcellus and Utica gas from western Pennsylvania into Ohio. Even better, the approval comes in roughly six months ahead of the company’s own published timeline. 
EOG Resources, the biggest acreage holder in the Ohio Utica, sent Chief Operating Officer Jeff Leitzell to the Barclays 40th Annual Energy-Power Conference yesterday (Sept. 9), and he spent a good chunk of his stage time explaining exactly how EOG thinks about our play. We’ve heard some of it before. But Leitzell went deeper on Utica geology than the company usually does on an earnings call — including a north-versus-south distinction that shapes how tightly EOG spaces its wells — and he dropped a fresh well-results number: three inherited Encino wells with 3.5-mile laterals that each came online at more than 35 million cubic feet per day (MMcf/d). He also confirmed that Ohio’s first in-basin frack sand mine is still on track for a year-end startup, and that the savings from it are not yet baked into EOG’s cost numbers.