MDN’s Energy Stories of Interest: Mon, Aug 18, 2025 [FREE ACCESS]
OTHER U.S. REGIONS: New Yorkers fighting against massive battery storage plants find new ally in EPA chief; Insane energy policies are set to burn Democrats in New Jersey, New York; NATIONAL: The climate industrial complex shifts to Plan B with climate lawfare; Celebrating a big beautiful victory with America First energy policies; AI means farewell to ‘net-zero’ fantasy; Treasury tightens tax credit eligibility for wind, solar projects; Summers are hot, obviously, but winters are the killers; INTERNATIONAL: Oil market awaits Trump-Putin summit as prices drift lower; BlackRock’s GIP leads $11B deal for Saudi gas assets; EU GHG emissions up 3.4 percent YoY in 1Q. Read More “MDN’s Energy Stories of Interest: Mon, Aug 18, 2025 [FREE ACCESS]”
For the week of August 4 – 10, the number of permits issued to drill new wells in the Marcellus/Utica dropped like a rock from the previous week. It was lousy. There were 10 new permits issued across the three M-U states last week, 24 fewer than the 34 issued two weeks ago. Pennsylvania was the only state to issue new permits. Both Ohio and West Virginia got skunked with ZERO new permits. The story in PA is the story of a single well pad. Nine of the 10 permits issued in PA were for a series of wells on a single pad in Greene County for EQT (under the name of Rice Drilling). The other permit was issued to Campbell Oil & Gas for a well in Clearfield County. 
Morgantown, WV-based Hope Utilities announced yesterday that its subsidiary, Northeast Ohio Natural Gas Corporation (NEO), will build, operate, and maintain a pipeline (and associated natural gas facilities) to supply a fuel cell project being developed by American Electric Power (AEP) to power a data center in central Ohio. The details are (so far) thin. We don’t know how much the project will cost or which data center it will power. This isn’t the first such pipeline project announced to feed an AEP-powered data center. 
According to a leftist Democrat publication, Signal Ohio, what was “supposed to be a sleepy, county-level Republican meeting where political allies get on the same page” turned into a shouting match between Marietta City Council President Susan Vessels (a Republican) and State Senator Brian Chavez (a Republican and Chairman of the Senate Energy Committee). The heated discussion revolved around wastewater injection wells and their proximity to city water supplies. Chavez is the former CEO of DeepRock Disposal Solutions, which currently operates four injection wells near Marietta and has applied to build a fifth. 
We spotted a Financial Times article with an intriguing title: Opec oil ‘price war’ will halt shale boom, say US producers. The FT is the UK equivalent of our Wall Street Journal. Although it tilts a bit left, the reporting is usually pretty reliable, so we trust it (for the most part). We learned a few important things from this article. First is that the break-even price for U.S. shale drillers to make a profit is $65 per barrel. If oil remains below that point, new drilling stops. Second, one producer claimed his company would not “put any more rigs out” until prices get back to, and stabilize at, $75 per barrel. 
Eastern Gas Transmission and Storage (EGTS), a subsidiary of billionaire Warren Buffett’s Berkshire Hathaway Energy (BHE), filed a new project with the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission (FERC) last December to beef up three existing compressor stations in Centre, Clinton, and Franklin counties in Pennsylvania, and one compressor station in Loudoun County, Virginia, to flow more Marcellus molecules to the Washington, D.C. area (see 
Rover Pipeline, a 713-mile natural gas pipeline, was designed to carry up to 3.25 billion cubic feet per day (Bcf/d) of Marcellus and Utica gas from Pennsylvania, West Virginia, and Ohio to destinations in Ohio, Michigan, West Virginia, and Canada. The project was completed and came online in late 2018 (see 
In 2018, Equitrans Midstream, the builder of the 303-mile Mountain Valley Pipeline (MVP), proposed to extend MVP by an extra 75 miles from the current terminus in Pittsylvania County, VA, to Alamance County, NC, to provide natural gas for heating and electric generation. The 75-mile extension is called MVP Southgate. In December 2023, MVP changed the Southgate plan by cutting the distance by more than half and bumping up the size (diameter) of the pipeline (see 
In April, MDN told you about a new greenfield expansion of the Elba Express pipeline into South Carolina to serve growing demand for natural gas in the state (see 
This post is not directly about the Marcellus/Utica, but the issue we discuss is important and significantly affects the M-U. Andrew Dehoff, the Executive Director of the Susquehanna River Basin Commission (SRBC), is sounding the alarm about potential water usage for hyperscale data centers that will be located in the SRBC’s jurisdiction. Dehoff spoke at a Pennsylvania State Senate hearing on Monday. These giant data centers are BIG users of energy and, potentially, big users of water. The water is used not only to cool gas-fired power plants that generate energy for the data centers, but the data centers themselves use water to help cool the thousands upon thousands of computers located in them. 
Competitive Power Ventures’ 680-megawatt CPV Valley Energy Center in Wawayanda, NY, fired up and began producing enough electricity to power 600,000 liberal NY homes in October 2018 (see 
Earlier today, Reuters published a great article titled “Key US natural gas trends to track as LNG exports hit new highs.” The article is full of terrific charts (and narrative) showing where our LNG is currently going (by country), along with where it has gone historically (by country). The article reveals that over the first 8 months of 2025, total U.S. LNG exports climbed by 22% or by 12.4 million tons from the same months in 2024 to a record 69 million tons. Europe accounted for over two-thirds of U.S. export volumes, followed by Asia. The top three markets were the Netherlands, France, and Spain, which together accounted for 28% of total U.S. LNG shipments so far this year.