Butler County | Energy Companies | Industrywide Issues | Lease & Royalty Payments | Litigation | Pennsylvania | XTO
6 Landowners Sent to Arbitration in XTO Butler Co. Royalty Suit
A federal magistrate judge has excluded six people (well, five leases covering six people and one municipal authority) from the 2,300-plus-member class suing XTO Energy over royalty underpayments in Butler County — not because XTO won a big legal fight, but because both sides agreed these particular leases require arbitration, not a courtroom. This is the latest chapter in Kriley v. XTO Energy Inc., the six-year-old Butler County royalty case MDN has followed since February (see Long-running Lawsuit Against XTO Energy Over Royalties in W. Pa.) and again in June (see XTO Energy Looks to Compel Arbitration in W. Pa. Royalties Case). Read More “6 Landowners Sent to Arbitration in XTO Butler Co. Royalty Suit”
Rochester, NY-based Energy Concepts has unveiled a modular natural gas power system called “Plato5X” that lets AI data centers generate their own electricity, make their own water, cool themselves, and capture 90% of their carbon emissions — without touching the local power grid or municipal water supply. Each 5-megawatt module runs on natural gas and is aimed squarely at the exploding AI/data center market, which is straining power grids and water systems across the country (
The last 18 months have been about as good as it gets for anyone who moves Marcellus and Utica molecules. President Trump’s Executive Order 14154 killed the Biden LNG export pause on day one. FERC rewrote its environmental review procedures in June 2025 to speed things up. And FERC finally drove a stake through Order No. 871, the Biden-era rule that let Big Green freeze construction on an approved pipeline just by filing an appeal (see 
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. 
MARCELLUS/UTICA REGION: DEP OKs Expand’s 3rd 16″ water pipeline in Bradford County, PA; Marcellus Shale Coalition president assesses state of gas industry; NATIONAL: U.S. natural gas futures extend losses to seven weeks; Battery storage capacity averaged 70% growth over the last three years; The activist playbook is to use litigation to slow America’s energy infrastructure; 2026 data center rejections hit 275; How U.S. natural gas came back from the dead; INTERNATIONAL: Oil steadies as Hormuz tensions flare; Iran says deal on Strait of Hormuz is close but not enough to open the waterway; Adnoc buys $1.3B of tankers as oil exports boom; EU softens Russian LNG sanctions, allowing shipping and trading to continue beyond 2027. 
The Marcellus/Utica region received (as near as we can tell) 15 new drilling permits last week, July 27 – August 2, down 4 from two weeks ago. The reason for our hesitation is that the Ohio Department of Natural Resources didn’t issue a report for last week. They sometimes are tardy in their report filing, catching it up in the next week’s report. The drillers who received new permits included: Seneca Resources (6), Expand Energy (6), JKLM Energy (2), and Jay-Bee Oil & Gas (1). 
Ascent Resources — one of the largest privately held oil and gas producers in the U.S. and the biggest gas driller in Ohio’s Utica Shale — issued its second quarter 2026 results on Wednesday. Ascent flowed 2,194 MMcfe/d (2.19 Bcfe/d) and booked a $303 million profit. But the real story for MDN readers isn’t the profit line. It’s what Ascent did with its checkbook: a leasing spree that nearly quadrupled land spending year over year, and a July deal that hands back a quarter-Bcf/d of long-haul pipeline space. 
Diversified Energy — the outfit that almost certainly owns more oil and gas wells than any other company in America — reported second quarter 2026 results on Aug. 5, and the big news is that after 25 years of buying up other people’s wells, Diversified is finally going to drill some of its own. Just not here in the Marcellus/Utica. 
MPLX LP — the Findlay, Ohio midstream giant that bought MarkWest back in 2015 and, in doing so, became the biggest gas processor in the Marcellus/Utica — posted second quarter 2026 results on Aug. 4. Buried in the usual pile of EBITDA-speak is a set of numbers M-U landowners and drillers should care about: MPLX’s Marcellus processing plants ran at 96% of capacity, its Utica gathering systems moved 18% more gas than a year ago, and a brand-new 300 MMcf/d processing plant is starting up in southwest Pennsylvania this month. Full disclosure up front: MPLX is not building all this steel because it likes the scenery. It’s building it because Appalachian producers are drilling again. 
Energy Transfer (ET), the Dallas-based pipeline behemoth that owns the Mariner East pipeline system, the Marcus Hook NGL terminal near Philadelphia, and a 32.6% stake in the Rover Pipeline, issued its second quarter 2026 update on Tuesday — and it was a monster. Adjusted EBITDA hit $5.07 billion, up 31% from 2Q25’s $3.87 billion. Distributable cash flow attributable to partners came in at $2.59 billion, up 32%. Net income attributable to partners more than doubled, hitting $2.09 billion versus $1.16 billion a year ago. ET raised its full-year 2026 EBITDA guidance to $18.8–$19.1 billion, up half a billion dollars at the midpoint from what the company told investors just three months ago. ET is a sprawling company with assets in 44 states, so let’s do what we always do — strip out the Permian noise and get to what matters for the Marcellus/Utica. 
Duke Energy reported second quarter 2026 results Tuesday, and while the earnings themselves are fine-but-boring utility fare, buried in the slide deck is one of the better demand stories going for Marcellus/Utica producers: Duke now has 6,025 megawatts (MW) of new gas-fired generation sited in North and South Carolina, every announced plant has its gas supply under contract, and the two pipelines that will carry most of those molecules south both trace back to Appalachia. 
New York’s Department of Environmental Conservation (DEC) and New York State Energy Research and Development Authority (NYSERDA) announced Wednesday they’ve formally adopted regulations tightening the Regional Greenhouse Gas Initiative (RGGI) — the multi-state carbon tax on coal- and gas-fired power plants — through 2037. The agencies used the words “affordable” or “affordability” six times in their joint announcement. Here’s what they didn’t mention: the price of an RGGI permit jumped 40% in one quarter this year, from $24.99 per ton in March to $35.00 in June. And New York households now pay the third-highest electricity prices in America, behind only Hawaii and California (according to federal data). Six mentions of affordability, zero mentions of the auction price. Funny how that works. 
With Devon Energy’s first full quarter as a combined Devon-Coterra company now in the books, the numbers on the former Coterra Marcellus assets tell an interesting story — one that lines up with what MDN has been reporting for months about activist pressure to sell the Appalachian position. Devon reported second-quarter 2026 earnings on August 4, followed by an analyst call on August 5. Buried in the supplemental tables and sprinkled through management’s answers to Wall Street analysts is a clear picture of how the Marcellus fits (or doesn’t) into the new, Permian-obsessed Devon. Below we break down what the company said — and didn’t say — about its Northeast Pennsylvania gas position, plus the latest on the broader portfolio review that has investors like Kimmeridge Energy pushing for a Marcellus sale. 
Houston-based EOG Resources posted record second-quarter 2026 results on August 4th, and buried inside the good news for shareholders is an even better story for Ohio landowners and the Utica supply chain: the former Encino Energy assets EOG bought a year ago are now outperforming the company’s own pre-acquisition playbook. EOG’s CEO called the deal a “home run” on the August 5th earnings call, and the numbers back him up — well costs down 20% from where Encino left them, drilling and completion speeds up double digits, and activity levels more than tripled versus pre-acquisition rates. Company-wide, EOG posted $2.7 billion in adjusted net income ($5.07/share), $2.8 billion of free cash flow, and record oil volumes of 548.8 MBod. Full detail below, with the Utica numbers front and center. 
EOG Resources has settled — and apparently bought out — the Noble County, Ohio landowner who beat it at the Sixth Circuit Court of Appeals last year in a fight over whether a driller can use one owner’s surface to drill horizontally into the neighbors’ minerals. The case, EOG Resources, Inc. v. Lucky Land Management, LLC, produced a published appellate ruling that’s now a go-to precedent on surface rights for horizontal (lateral) drilling anywhere severed mineral estates exist — which describes most of the Marcellus/Utica. MDN first flagged this case a year ago when we caught the 6th Circuit’s reversal (see below) but couldn’t pin down the county or the full backstory (see