MDN’s Energy Stories of Interest: Thu, Jul 17, 2025 [FREE ACCESS]
MARCELLUS/UTICA REGION: Energy Innovation Center Institute training program could go national; OTHER U.S. REGIONS: California’s climate superfund bills fail again; Let’s hope Kathy Hochul took notes as investors poured $100B into Pa. for AI projects; NATIONAL: What’s the state of oil hiring in the USA?; U.S. proved reserves fell in 2023 from 2022 record; Gen Z is getting realistic about energy; Pumping the brakes on alternative energy; INTERNATIONAL: Oil rebounds after weak start; Market underestimating chance of Russian gas flow disruption; The oil boom no one wants to talk about. Read More “MDN’s Energy Stories of Interest: Thu, Jul 17, 2025 [FREE ACCESS]”
The largest amount of money to be invested in Pennsylvania in the coming decade by a single company, announced yesterday at Senator Dave McCormick’s Pennsylvania Energy and Innovation Summit held in Pittsburgh, came from Blackstone, the world’s largest alternative asset manager. Blackstone pledged to invest *at least* $25 billion in the next 10 years in the Keystone State to (a) build data centers in the northeastern part of the state, and (b) build new Marcellus-fired power plants to provide electricity for those data centers. It’s a staggering amount of money. Blackstone President & COO, Jon Gray, was at yesterday’s event and said PA’s access to natural gas gives it a considerable advantage. “You can co-locate the data centers directly next to the source of power. That’s really the secret sauce here.” The Marcellus is responsible for Blackstone’s $25 billion investment! STAGGERING. 
In a day of big news, there was big news related to the largest gas-fired power plant project in the country, along with a massive data center complex, to be built at a former coal-fired power plant site in Indiana County, PA (see 
Data centers, which are buildings full of computers crunching search queries and other requests, along with artificial intelligence (AI), which uses data centers, are closely tied to the natural gas industry. Data centers require enormous amounts of electricity, and the fastest and most scalable solution to provide that electricity is to construct gas-fired power plants. You see the connection between data centers and Marcellus/Utica natural gas. According to MDN friend Mark Caskey, founder and CEO of Steel Nation, supplying electricity for data centers is natural gas’s next big role. He should know. 
You gotta hand it to Pennsylvania Democrats. They LOVE LOVE LOVE to tax other people’s money—especially companies and industries that they hate, like the state’s oil and gas industry. On July 8, PA State Senator Art Haywood (Democrat from Philadelphia) introduced PA Senate Bill (SB) 910, which slaps a 6.5% severance tax on the gross production of all oil and natural gas produced in the state. However, the bill goes further by repealing the provision in the 2012 Act 13 law that states that if a severance tax is ever implemented, the existing impact fee would be eliminated. In other words, Haywood’s bill eliminates the provision to end the impact fee, meaning the impact fee would remain in place. So, drillers would be taxed twice for the same thing. Fortunately, the bill is DOA in the Senate. 
Verne, Inc., a California-based energy company, announced last week that it will open its first manufacturing plant in the Marcellus Energy Park near Muncy, Lycoming County, PA. Verne developed a process to increase the density of hydrogen by storing the gas in a cold and compressed state, making it more efficient to transport in larger volumes. The new PA facility (which should be up and running in nine months) will build the storage tanks for this cold hydrogen. The hydrogen will be transported via truck to power data centers, drilling sites, construction sites, and more. 
The media fuss is hard to miss about today’s Pennsylvania Energy and Innovation Summit being held at Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh. PA Senator Dave McCormick organized the event. Among the attendees will be President Trump, several cabinet secretaries, and other White House officials. Much of the buzz is around $90 billion in AI and energy investments expected to be announced. In preparation for the big event, a roundtable was held yesterday at CNX headquarters in Washington County, PA, to discuss clearing away permitting obstacles and red tape to help PA realize some (if not most) of that $90 billion in investments. 
The more the Pennsylvania Department of Environmental Protection (DEP) beats the drum to say it has solved the slooooooow permitting process in the state, the more hollow it rings. It seems like every other week, the DEP issues a press release to announce it has almost cleared all of the agency’s backlog of permits. Another such pronouncement was issued yesterday. The DEP claims its permit backlog has been reduced by 98% since November 2023, decreasing the backlog from over 2,400 permit applications to fewer than 50. Good for them. 
Kentucky has experienced unprecedented economic growth in recent years, similar to other southern states. Data centers are looking to Kentucky for future expansion. Last fall, Louisville Gas and Electric Company (LG&E) and Kentucky Utilities Company (KU), both part of PPL Corporation, forecasted in their Integrated Resource Plan (IRP) the need for additional power generation due to the expected influx of data centers and economic development across their service territories (see 