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3rd Circuit Revives XTO Bid to Arbitrate PA Royalty Claims
A federal appeals court has handed XTO Energy (ExxonMobil’s shale subsidiary) a win in a long-running Western Pennsylvania royalty lawsuit, ruling Monday that XTO did NOT give up its right to push some landowners into private arbitration — even though it spent 55 months litigating the case before it asked. The case is Salvatora v. XTO Energy Inc., a cousin of the Kriley case MDN has also followed. Same defendant, same Pittsburgh courthouse, same plaintiffs’ firm, same complaint: landowners say XTO shaved too much off their royalty checks for “post-production costs” — the gathering, compression, and processing charges that move gas from the wellhead to a buyer. Read More “3rd Circuit Revives XTO Bid to Arbitrate PA Royalty Claims”
A new Penn State study went looking for radium from fracking in southwestern Pennsylvania drinking water. It tested 91 private wells and springs in Washington and Greene counties and found exactly zero samples above the EPA limit — and the radium it did find carries the chemical fingerprint of the rock the water sits in, not Marcellus brine. You wouldn’t know that from Penn State’s press release headline, which falsely blares, “
MARCELLUS/UTICA REGION: Pa. can — and should — support data centers; Fetterman rejects data center and AI ‘doomsdaying’ after Shapiro executive order; OTHER U.S. REGIONS: SpaceX is hiring in natural gas trading for energy needs; NATIONAL: U.S. natural gas futures edge up; The Climate Change scam may be on its deathbed; INTERNATIONAL: Oil retreats while Iran pressure builds. 
The U.S. Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit last Friday slammed the door on Big Green’s attempt to yank the New York water permit for the Williams/Transco Northeast Supply Enhancement (NESE) pipeline. Six environmental groups asked the court to vacate the Clean Water Act Section 401 water quality certification (WQC) that the New York State Dept. of Environmental Conservation (DEC) issued in November 2025. In a summary order issued Aug. 21, a three-judge panel said no. The permit stands. NESE, already under construction, keeps building. 
The highly functional and responsible Susquehanna River Basin Commission (SRBC), unlike its dysfunctional and irresponsible counterpart, the Delaware River Basin Commission (DRBC), continues to support the shale energy industry by approving water withdrawals and consumptive use requests for responsible, safe shale drilling. The SRBC published a notice in the August 22nd Pennsylvania Bulletin that the SRBC approved and/or renewed 35 general water use permits in July for individual shale gas well drilling pads in Bradford, Centre, Clearfield, Clinton, Lycoming, Susquehanna, Tioga, and Wyoming counties. 
PJM Interconnection — the grid operator that keeps the lights on for 67 million people across 13 states and DC, including most of the Marcellus/Utica region — dropped its new five-year strategy last Wednesday (Aug. 19). Most of the coverage focused on the four bullet-point priorities, which read like every corporate strategy document ever written. But if you skip to page 5, PJM says two things out loud that our industry has been shouting for a decade: pipeline constraints are choking the grid, and the grid is getting less reliable as it gets more intermittent. 
Three weeks, same number. The Marcellus/Utica held at 35 rigs again last week — Pennsylvania 16, Ohio 10, West Virginia 9, nobody budging. This time we had company: the national count fell five to 588, the first decline in four weeks. And the Haynesville, which has been eating our lunch all summer, gave back two rigs. The bigger story, though, is happening after the drilling stops. Frac crews nationally dropped by nine in a single week. 
The Marcellus/Utica region received 27 new drilling permits last week, August 10 – 16, up significantly from the 8 permits issued two weeks ago. In something of a reversal, Pennsylvania turned in the fewest new permits, just 4. Ohio issued the most permits, with 16, and West Virginia issued 7 permits. The drillers who received new permits were: Antero Resources (6), Ascent Resources (5), EOG Resources (8), Expand Energy (4), Jay-Bee Oil & Gas (1), LOLA Energy (1), Range Resources (1), and Seneca Resources (1). 
Score one for the good guys. The Ohio Power Siting Board (OPSB) voted yesterday (Aug. 20) to hand Chestnut Run Energy LLC its Certificate of Environmental Compatibility and Public Need — the golden ticket needed to build a 1,300-megawatt (MW), $2 billion natural gas-fired power plant in Washington Township, Carroll County. That’s smack in the middle of Utica Shale country. MDN first told you about this project back in April (see 
The Columbus Dispatch — a paper based 120 miles northwest of the action — parachuted into Marietta, Ohio, yesterday with a long story about shale wastewater injection wells that leads with the words “radioactive,” “toxic,” and “Russian roulette,” and waits ten paragraphs to tell readers the one fact that matters most: no evidence of drinking water contamination has turned up. Not now. Not in 15 years. We’ve covered this fight since 2025, and we’ll say again what we said in July — there IS a real problem here, but it isn’t the one the Dispatch is selling.