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17 New Shale Well Permits Reported for PA-OH-WV Sep 14 – 20
The Marcellus/Utica region received 17 new drilling permits last week, September 14 – 20, up 1 from the 16 permits issued two weeks ago. Pennsylvania issued 6 of the new permits. Ohio also issued 6 new permits. And West Virginia issued 5 new permits. The drillers who received new permits last week were: Ascent Resources, EOG Resources, EQT, Expand Energy, and Seneca Resources. Read More “17 New Shale Well Permits Reported for PA-OH-WV Sep 14 – 20”
On Thursday morning, a natural gas leak at the Saunders Creek Regulator Station near Milton, WV (Cabell County) forced TC Energy’s Columbia Gas Transmission (TCO) to declare “force majeure” on the Mountaineer XPress (MXP) pipeline, one of the biggest Marcellus/Utica takeaway pipes in the region. Starting with today’s gas day (Friday, Sept. 25), the affected segment of MXP is cut to zero capacity until further notice. TCO estimates the hit to firm customers at 1.8 million dekatherms (MMDth) per day, which is roughly 1.8 billion cubic feet per day (Bcf/d) of Appalachian gas that suddenly needs somewhere else to go. Traders noticed. The October NYMEX futures contract settled up 27.4 cents (+9.06%) at $3.297 per MMBtu, the highest in about three months and the biggest one-day gain since January. 
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. 
Columbia Gas Transmission (a TC Energy company) has asked federal regulators for permission to permanently walk away from three underground natural gas storage fields straddling the Pennsylvania/West Virginia line near Majorsville — plugging 71 wells, tearing out a compressor station, and abandoning nearly 20 miles of pipe. On September 9, FERC set the clock on its environmental review. If you’re a landowner in Greene or Washington County, PA, or Marshall County, WV, this one lands in your backyard. Here’s the plain-English version of a very technical filing. 
CNX Resources isn’t going anywhere in north-central West Virginia. At a community event at the Blacksville Volunteer Fire Department social hall, CNX Chief Operating Officer Navneet Behl laid out a drilling calendar for the company’s Wadestown operation in western Monongalia County through 2029. CNX has 24 wells already producing on three pads there, is working on six more wells on those same pads, and is building a brand-new pad slated for 13 more wells. The company says it expects to pay about $525 million in royalties on those 19 new wells. That’s the good news. The not-so-good news came from the same guy: Behl admitted CNX can only drill so much in Appalachia because there still aren’t enough pipelines to haul the gas away. 
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%). 
West Virginia has sued the Pennsylvania Public Utility Commission in federal court, arguing that two Pennsylvania laws — Act 40 of 2017 and Act 114 of 2020 — built a wall around the state’s “alternative energy credit” market and locked out every power producer outside Pennsylvania’s borders. West Virginia Attorney General JB McCuskey filed the 54-page complaint on September 3 in the U.S. District Court for the Middle District of Pennsylvania, and here’s the kicker: the PUC’s own annual report, published seven months earlier, told the legislature that these very rules needed a second look. 
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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