M-U Falls to 33, Lowest Since 2024; Nat’l Stuck at 588 3rd Week
Two things happened last week, and both of them are unusual. Pennsylvania dropped a rig to 15, pulling the combined Marcellus/Utica down to 33 — a number we haven’t printed since the fall of 2024. And the national count came in at 588 for the third consecutive week. Not 588, then 587, then 589. The same number, three times in a row. We’ve been writing this column a long time, and we can’t recall the national count sitting perfectly still for three straight reports. Underneath it, the shuffle continued: two more oil rigs, two fewer gas rigs. Look at the price sheet, and you’ll see why. WTI settled Friday near $90.76 a barrel. Natural gas settled around $2.98 per MMBtu. Read More “M-U Falls to 33, Lowest Since 2024; Nat’l Stuck at 588 3rd Week”
Devon Energy’s Coterra unit is asking Pennsylvania regulators for permission to lay 18.4 miles of 20-inch freshwater pipeline across three Susquehanna County townships — which is a strange thing to spend money on if you’re about to sell the place. The Department of Environmental Protection (DEP) published the notice in the September 5 Pennsylvania Bulletin, opening a comment window that closes October 5. The project is the Brooks to Forwood Temporary Waterline, running through Springville, Lathrop, and Lenox townships. 
Shell Chemical Appalachia signed a consent order and agreement (COA) with the Pennsylvania Dept. of Environmental Protection (DEP) last Friday, Sept. 4, agreeing to hand over $15 million to settle three years’ worth of air, storage tank, and water violations at its Monaca (Beaver County) ethane cracker. Half of it — $7.5 million — is an actual civil penalty. The other half is a “contribution” to a brand-new community fund. If that arrangement sounds familiar, it should. It’s the same two-bucket structure the Shapiro administration used to squeeze nearly $10 million out of Shell back in May 2023. 
The hill above Homer City now has more people working on it than the borough below has living in it. Homer City Generation dropped a Labor Day announcement on Friday: more than 1,800 direct-hire tradespeople and skilled contractors are on site building the 4.4-gigawatt (GW) gas-fired plant and data center campus rising from the bones of what was once Pennsylvania’s largest coal-fired power station. The borough of Homer City has roughly 1,800 residents. That’s a nice bit of symmetry, and it says more about what this project means to Indiana County than any press release paragraph could. 
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. 
Pennsylvania’s utility regulators just told the General Assembly what Marcellus drillers have been saying for two years: the electricity business is about to get very busy, and natural gas is going to be the one doing the heavy lifting. On Tuesday, September 1, the Pennsylvania Public Utility Commission (PUC) released its annual Electric Power Outlook for Pennsylvania, this one covering 2025 through 2030. The report is required by state law — the PUC has to collect demand forecasts from the state’s 11 electric distribution companies (EDCs, the utilities that run the poles and wires to your house) and hand a summary to the Legislature and the Governor every September. Usually it’s a snoozer. Not this year. 
EQT is planning another pipeline — and this one is big. Through a brand-new subsidiary called Appalachian Transmission Gateway LLC (ATG), the Marcellus/Utica’s largest driller has opened bidding on the “POWER Pipeline,” a 42-inch, 50-mile line that would carry a full 1 billion cubic feet per day (Bcf/d) of gas from Greene County, Pennsylvania, west to the Clarington hub in Monroe County, Ohio. The open season quietly began Aug. 26 and runs through Oct. 26. We found no press release announcing it — the notice simply went up, and the trade press caught it a week later. 
Range Resources had a genuinely rotten 16 hours at its Laurel Hill B well pad in Cogan House Township, Lycoming County, last week. First, a gasket blew on a water filter pod and sent recycled frack water down the pad’s fill slope. Then, while the state inspector was standing there writing that one up, a water truck hauling more of the same stuff drove off the access road and rolled over. MDN obtained both DEP inspection reports, and they tell a more complete story than the headlines indicate. 
Yesterday, the Pennsylvania Independent Fiscal Office (IFO) released its quarterly Natural Gas Production Report covering April through June 2026 (full copy below). Three numbers, all pointing in the same direction: PA drillers spudded (started drilling) 89 new horizontal wells in 2Q26, down 16 wells (-15.2%) from the 105 spudded in 2Q25. Production volume was 1,925 billion cubic feet (Bcf), down 32 Bcf (-1.6%) from 1,957 Bcf in 2Q25 — the lowest quarterly volume since 4Q24. And the average Pennsylvania spot hub price was $2.11 per MMBtu, down 27 cents (-11.3%) from last year’s $2.38. 
Fayette County, Pennsylvania, spent six months quietly chasing NextEra Energy’s giant gas plant, and now that it’s landed, county officials are publicly sharing their support. Two follow-up stories — one from the Pittsburgh Business Times, one from Salena Zito at the Washington Examiner — fill in a lot of what we didn’t have yesterday about the East Riverside Energy Center. Including who is actually going to own the thing. Hint: it isn’t NextEra. 
Anti-drilling group Protect PT has opened a new front against the biggest gas-fired AI project in Westmoreland County, Pennsylvania. On Aug. 25, Protect PT and two Upper Burrell residents — Allen Uhler and Guy Fuller — filed a land use appeal in Westmoreland County Court challenging the township supervisors’ approval of TECfusions’ work at the former Alcoa/Arconic research campus. Notably, the appeal doesn’t attack the gas turbines or the Marcellus wells feeding them. It attacks a piece of paper. Or rather, the absence of one. 
Eight anti-fossil fuel groups gathered on the banks of the Delaware River on September 2 to hold a press conference defending the Delaware River Basin Commission’s ban on fracking. Here’s the part that made us laugh: they already won in July. Republican leadership never even offered the amendment that would have stripped the DRBC of its power to ban drilling. So why hold a rally to defend something that isn’t under attack? Because they’re nervous — and when you read what they’re claiming, you can see why. 
We finally have a number. Two weeks after a casing failure sent frack water gushing across the Infinity Natural Resources (NYSE: INR) Cooper well pad in Young Township, Indiana County, PA, the Department of Environmental Protection (DEP) has put an estimate on it: 336,000 gallons of frack flowback water released during the incident. An “undetermined amount” of that reached Whiskey Run, the small stream below the pad. Here’s what that number actually means — and what it still doesn’t tell us. 