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NRG Buys 18 Gas-Fired Power Plants, Including 5 in PA, for $12B
NRG Energy agreed to acquire LS Power’s portfolio of natural-gas power plants in a deal valued at roughly $12 billion, including debt, that will expand NRG’s footprint in Texas and along the East Coast. NRG said the acquisition would give it 18 more natural-gas-fired facilities in nine states—including five in Pennsylvania and one in Ohio—doubling its generation capacity to about 25 gigawatts (GW). The PA acquisition includes the Springdale natural gas power station in Allegheny County, the Armstrong plant in Indiana County, the Gans plant in Fayette County, the Chambersburg plant in Franklin County, and the Ironwood plant in Lebanon County. Read More “NRG Buys 18 Gas-Fired Power Plants, Including 5 in PA, for $12B”
Infinity Natural Resources (INR), headquartered in Morgantown, WV, focuses 100% on the Marcellus/Utica. The company went public earlier this year with a $265 million ($20/share) initial public offering, giving INR a $1.18 billion market capitalization (see 
A series of earthquakes (low level, sometimes felt, most of the time not felt) have hit Guernsey and Noble counties in eastern Ohio. According to the latest news we can find, some five quakes have hit since April 22, and another couple of quakes hit earlier in the year, in January/February. There is an existing fault line in the area, near Cambridge, known as the Burning Springs-Cambridge fault zone, formed more than 4.6 million years ago. So, earthquakes in the region are not unknown. The question is, why this most recent flurry? The Ohio Department of Natural Resources (ODNR) claims it’s tied to oil and gas activity in the area. 
Wow, what a difference four years can make! In May 2021, Gulfport Energy, the third-largest driller in the Ohio Utica Shale (by the number of wells drilled), emerged from bankruptcy with a new board and new management (see 
Earlier this year, an undisclosed shale driller asked the Ohio Oil and Gas Land Management Commission (OGLMC) to consider opening up an additional 4,360 acres of state-owned Egypt Valley Wildlife Area in Belmont County for shale drilling under the land (see 
For the week of April 28 – May 4, the number of permits issued to drill new wells in the Marcellus/Utica was down two from the previous week. Last week, 22 new permits were issued in the M-U. In the Keystone State (PA), 10 new permits were issued. The top permittee was NFG’s Seneca Resources, which had four permits in Tioga County. PennEnergy Resource received two permits in Butler County. Expand Energy (SWN) received two permits in Lycoming County. Finally, both Coterra Energy and EQT (Rice Drilling) received a single permit, in Susquehanna and Washington counties, respectively. 
We’re catching up on two weeks of changes in the rig count, and wow! Things changed. And NOT in a good way. The national count lost nine rigs over the past two weeks, going from 587 on April 25 to 584 on May 2 and then down to 578 on May 9. But it was the Marcellus/Utica that caught our attention. Two weeks ago, for the May 2 Baker Hughes rig count, Ohio dropped three rigs in a single week, going from 12 on April 25 to nine on May 2. The Ohio count remained at nine on May 9. Consequently, the combined M-U count went from 38 two weeks ago to 35 and has remained at that level. Both Pennsylvania and West Virginia kept their same counts of 18 and 8, respectively. 
This is news of a lawsuit with implications for drillers, rights owners, and surface land owners that we were not previously aware of. EOG Resources, an oil and gas drilling giant with nearly half a million leased acres in Ohio, holds drilling rights on land owned by Lucky Land Management in Ohio—we could not determine the exact location or county. The two sides couldn’t agree on whether EOG’s rights to drill included the right to drill from Lucky Land’s surface out to adjacent properties as well. So EOG sued. EOG then asked a district court to grant a preliminary injunction, allowing the company to access the land to cut down trees and begin constructing wells. The district court did so, finding that EOG would probably succeed on the merits of the case. 
Local townships, whether governed by a majority of Republicans or Democrats, typically reject proposals to install massive, ugly, bird-killing (and filled with toxic chemicals) solar farms, no matter where they are tried (red or blue states). It’s a problem for the tone deaf environmental left. Solar farms are even rejected in blue New York! Another such installation tried to gain approval in Stark County, Ohio, recently. The Ohio Power Siting Board, citing local opposition, rejected a permit for a 150 megawatt solar farm that would have gobbled up 860 acres in Washington Township. 
Yesterday, the Ohio Supreme Court issued a ruling dismissing a case that leaves in place a ruling from the Seventh District Court of Appeals. The case, Darrell Crozier et al. v. Pipe Creek Conservancy LLC et al., involves a decision on who owns the oil and gas rights underlying a property in rural Belmont County. The case revolves around the Ohio Marketable Title Act (MTA), something we’ve written about multiple times (