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”

West Virginia State Treasurer Larry Pack released a report Tuesday that finally puts real numbers on a question a lot of Mountain State residents have been shouting past each other about: when a giant data center lands in your county, who actually gets the tax money? The answer, according to Treasury Strategic Analyst Mark Muchow, is that two projects alone — the Penzance Management campus in Berkeley County and Google’s project in Putnam County — would generate more than $103 million a year in property taxes, and roughly 62% of it stays home with county commissions and county school boards. 
Competitive Power Ventures (CPV) and EQT Corporation have signed a 10-year gas supply agreement that locks up the entire fuel appetite of the CPV Shay Energy Center, the $3 billion, 2,100-megawatt (MW) combined-cycle plant headed for Doddridge County, West Virginia. It’s the deal that turns Shay from a project on paper into a project with a fuel contract.
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Last week, the Pennsylvania Marcellus lost one rig, now down to 16 active rigs after running 17 rigs for 12 weeks in a row. Bummer. Ohio lost a rig two weeks ago and didn’t pick it back up last week, remaining at 10 active rigs for the second week. And West Virginia picked up Ohio’s lost rig two weeks ago, boosting its number to 9 active rigs, maintaining that number last week. All told, the M-U operated 35 rigs last week, which is 21 fewer than our biggest rival (for money and attention), the Haynesville, which operated 56 rigs last week.
Peregrine Energy Partners, the Dallas-based royalty buyer we’ve been tracking since 2019, is back in the Marcellus/Utica with its checkbook open. Yesterday (Aug. 4), the company announced it closed five separate mineral and royalty deals — two of them right here in the M-U — totaling roughly 3,680 net royalty acres and interests in more than 1,240 producing wells. The first Appalachian deal is a cash-flowing overriding royalty portfolio in Susquehanna County, PA, covering about 936 gross acres and 86 producing horizontal Coterra Energy (now Devon Energy) wells, with more than 50 DUCs and PUDs behind them in both the Upper and Lower Marcellus.
Back in January 2022, we brought you what looked like a milestone: the WV Dept. of Environmental Protection had issued a construction permit for a big Marcellus gas-fired power plant next door to the Longview coal plant in Maidsville, Monongalia County (see
There’s terrific news brewing in Grant County, West Virginia — with an asterisk roughly the size of a cooling tower. Word circulated over the weekend that Dominion Energy plans to build a brand-new natural gas-fired power plant at its Mt. Storm complex, the same site where three coal-fired units have been cranking out electrons since 1965. The key detail: the gas plant would run alongside the coal units, not replace them. That’s more power, not swapped power. We like that math.