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”

A Dallas-based hyperscaler wants to build a 1.7-million-square-foot computing campus — plus its very own 450-megawatt natural gas power plant — on a reclaimed strip mine in Washington County, PA. The gas would come off a lateral tied to Energy Transfer’s Rover Pipeline, which runs right past the property line. Prime Data Centers made its first real presentation to the Hanover Township Board of Supervisors Monday night, in front of a fire hall packed past capacity with residents who are, to put it mildly, not sold. Three hours of testimony later, the supervisors scheduled four more hearings.
Back in June, we praised South Strabane Township in Washington County, PA, for doing the hard, unglamorous work of writing data center rules instead of slamming the door shut (see 
A new Penn State study went looking for radium from fracking in southwestern Pennsylvania drinking water. It tested 91 private wells and springs in Washington and Greene counties and found exactly zero samples above the EPA limit — and the radium it did find carries the chemical fingerprint of the rock the water sits in, not Marcellus brine. You wouldn’t know that from Penn State’s press release headline, which falsely blares, “
Wow! Where did the last 10 years go? In June 2015, MDN brought you the news of two Pennsylvania business groups, the Delaware County Chamber and the Washington County Chamber, along with two labor unions, the Laborers’ International Union of North America (LiUNA) with 25,000 members and the International Union of Operating Engineers (IUOE) Local 66 with 7,000 members, joining forces to form the
We are encouraged by recent developments in two Pennsylvania townships, one in northeast PA, the other in southwest PA, with respect to moving forward with data center projects. We get it. People are up in arms, some feeling as though data centers are being “forced” on them by less-than-transparent builders. Noise. Lights. Water usage. All are concerns. However, as we’ve stated many times, reasonable people can work together, sort through the issues, and move these projects along. That’s what we’re seeing in Olyphant, PA, a suburb of Scranton in Lackawanna County, and in South Strabane Township in Washington County.
The Pennsylvania Department of Environmental Protection issued an air quality permit on May 18, 2026, to MarkWest Liberty Midstream, authorizing the expansion of its Harmon Creek Natural Gas Processing Plant in Washington County. The MarkWest name is still used, although the company is now MPLX. The DEP permit approval allows the addition of a third cryogenic plant and a second de-ethanization plant. A number of Big Green groups colluded in an attempt to block the permits, but their demands were ignored.