It’s Official: Devon Keeping NEPA Marcellus, Won’t Sell (For Now)
After six months of will-they-or-won’t-they, we finally have an answer. Devon Energy is keeping its northeast Pennsylvania Marcellus assets, the old Cabot Oil & Gas (later Coterra) position centered on Susquehanna County. Devon wrapped up its post-merger “portfolio review” with its third-quarter 2026 update on Thursday. The only asset going out the door is the Eagle Ford in South Texas, which is being sold to Crescent Energy for $4.2 billion (see Devon Energy Sells Eagle Ford for $4.2B: Is the Marcellus Next?). The Marcellus, along with the Anadarko and the Rockies, now gets the label “complementary asset.” Activist hedge fund TOMS Capital says it is “profoundly disappointed” and still wants Devon to sell the whole company. So is this story over? Not quite. Read More “It’s Official: Devon Keeping NEPA Marcellus, Won’t Sell (For Now)”
When EQT announced on Oct. 26 that it would buy Range Resources (see 
Last week we told you storm clouds were gathering over the Marcellus now that Democrats control all three levers of state government in Harrisburg (see 
Back in May, we told you that FTAI Infrastructure agreed to sell Long Ridge Energy & Power, the 505-megawatt (MW) natural gas-fired power plant and 1,600-acre former Ormet aluminum smelter site in Hannibal (Monroe County), Ohio, to bitcoin miner-turned-AI data center developer MARA Holdings for $1.52 billion (see 
TC Energy, the Canadian pipeline giant that owns Columbia Gas Transmission (the No. 1 pipeline operator in Appalachia, by its own count), released its third-quarter 2026 results last Thursday. The big news for our region: TC approved a US$1.8 billion expansion of its Crossroads pipeline, designed in part to carry Marcellus/Utica gas west to the Midwest. CEO François Poirier said Crossroads and the Appalachia Supply Project (approved in April) amount to “two major arteries of egress out of the Appalachian Basin.” TC also told analysts it expects Appalachian gas production to grow by another 10 Bcf/d (billion cubic feet per day) by 2035. Music to our ears! 
EOG Resources, the Houston-based giant that bought Encino Energy’s Ohio Utica empire in August 2025 for $5.6 billion, issued its third-quarter update last week. Company-wide, it was a record quarter for oil, NGL, and natural gas production. For the Utica, the headline is speed and cost: EOG says it’s drilling faster, fracking faster, and spending 20% less per foot than Encino did. The company will also open its own in-basin Ohio sand mine before the end of this year, saving more than $300,000 per well. And yes, EOG is talking to data centers about Utica gas. 
Four years after Shell’s Beaver County ethane cracker started up, it’s about to get a permanent air permit. In Saturday’s Pennsylvania Bulletin, DEP announced it intends to issue the plant’s first Title V operating permit. Until now, the $14 billion complex has run on a string of temporary permits that DEP kept extending. The public can comment until January 19, with a meeting on December 17 and a hearing on January 7. Expect the usual suspects to show up. Expect plenty of union hard hats too. 
Ten weeks. Still 33. The Marcellus/Utica held at 33 rigs for the week ended November 6, a tenth straight week at the same number. The national count finally broke its four-week stay at 603, edging up one to 604, a new 52-week high. Oil rigs added one and gas rigs added one. Frac spreads climbed by four, ending a three-week slide. On the price board, it was a tale of two commodities: WTI fell 12.76% for the week, back down to $90.83 a barrel, while December natural gas rose 10 cents to $2.998 per MMBtu, a whisker under $3. Plus: Devon drops off the Enverus permit list after four weeks at nine, Range Resources’ permits fall back to earth, and EQT and EOG are now tied for the top spot on the rig list. 
Enbridge, the Canadian pipeline giant that owns Texas Eastern (TETCO), Algonquin Gas Transmission, half of the NEXUS Pipeline, and Ohio’s biggest gas utility, issued its third-quarter 2026 update on Friday. For the Marcellus/Utica, the big news is Project Beacon, the ~300 MMcf/d (million cubic feet per day) Algonquin expansion into New England. Enbridge says it expects to finalize customer contracts early in the new year. There’s also a rate deal for Enbridge Gas Ohio, a new TVA pipeline that ties into TETCO, and some diplomatic words about Ohio’s new governor from Enbridge’s incoming CEO. 
MARCELLUS/UTICA REGION: State Sen. Gene Yaw expects to work with Democrat majority in new legislative year; Why $1 spot prices aren’t enough to rescue Appalachian natural gas markets; OTHER U.S. REGIONS: QatarEnergy in talks to secure up to 2 mtpa of LNG from NextDecade’s Texas project; Texas moratorium on data center grid connections disrupts U.S. project pipeline; NATIONAL: U.S. natural gas futures settle higher; The green new caucus goes to Washington; How Democrats used the midterms to turn affordability concerns into ‘green populism’; Democrats promised affordability…Wall Street just got the bill; Big Oil sweats a blue setback on permitting; Anthropic strikes $3.4bn deal to generate gas-fired power for data centres; INTERNATIONAL: Oil posts biggest weekly drop since 2022; Oil market arrives at ‘remarkable destination’; A wave of new LNG supply will change who wins in gas; UN ‘biodiversity’ summit advances global control over land, money, & resources. 
The Marcellus/Utica region received a paltry 4 new shale well permits last week, Oct. 26 – Nov. 1, down 5 from the anemic 9 the week before. Pennsylvania issued 2 new permits, Ohio issued none, and West Virginia issued 2. The drillers who received new-well permits last week were: CNX, EQT, and PennEnergy Resources. It was a sleepy week. Ohio didn’t issue a single horizontal shale permit of any kind: no new wells, no deepens, no location changes. Maybe somebody went on vacation at ODNR? The busier paperwork was on older permits: 11 modifications across PA and WV, eight of them for one EQT pad in Wetzel County. 
Time for another check of what our Marcellus/Utica (M-U) molecules are selling for, and the news is about what you’d expect after weeks of mild fall weather: not much. On Wednesday, the Henry Hub spot price (the national benchmark in Louisiana) averaged $2.610 per MMBtu (million British thermal units, roughly 1,000 cubic feet of gas). Here in the Northeast, gas for Thursday delivery sold for about a dollar. Mid-Atlantic gas (Texas Eastern M-3) went for $1.06, New York City (Transco Zone 6 NY) for $1.03, and New England (Algonquin Citygate) for $1.31. On Thursday, Texas Eastern M-2, the main pricing point for gas produced in southwestern PA, West Virginia, and Ohio, ticked up 5 cents to $1.100. That’s still less than half the Henry Hub price. A new NGI analysis explains why: heating demand in the East is running way behind last year, so the region has more gas than it needs. Even Canada has quit sending us much gas. 
Gulfport Energy, one of the largest drillers in the Ohio Utica, issued its third-quarter 2026 update this week, and it was a solid one. Total production averaged 1,057.2 MMcfe/d (million cubic feet equivalent per day), up about 10% from the second quarter, while liquids production (oil, condensate and NGLs) jumped 67% to 23.5 Mbbl/d (thousand barrels per day). But the bigger news is where CEO Nick Dell’Osso, now five months into the job after being shown the door at Expand Energy, is steering the company: a continuous two-rig drilling program in Ohio starting in 2027, an electric frac fleet, less spending in Oklahoma, another premium-priced gas sales deal into the Midwest, and a fatter $2.0 billion stock buyback authorization. 
Enverus Intelligence Research (EIR) just released its quarterly scorecard on oil and gas mergers and acquisitions (M&A), and the Marcellus/Utica is all over it. U.S. upstream deals (buying and selling wells, acreage, and whole drilling companies) totaled $12.6 billion in the third quarter, and October added another $18 billion, led by EQT’s $13.8 billion takeover of Range Resources. That pushes 2026’s total to $80.5 billion, and the year still has two months to go. That’s already more than all of 2025. The part that should get our readers’ attention is Enverus’s prediction that the Utica is the most likely place for the next big gas merger. 
National Fuel Gas Company (NFG), the Buffalo-based utility, pipeline and drilling company that plans to spin off its Seneca Resources drilling subsidiary as a separate public company in the second half of 2027, issued its fiscal fourth-quarter (Jul-Sep) and full-year 2026 update this week. (NFG’s fiscal year runs Oct. 1 to Sept. 30.) The parent company had a very good year, with adjusted earnings up 9%. Seneca, not so much. Seneca’s production dropped 7% in the quarter to 104 Bcf (about 1.13 Bcf/d). Full-year output of 419.5 Bcf came in below even the lowered guidance, and Seneca expects fiscal 2027 production to be roughly flat. Management blamed three things: a dud Marcellus pad in Lycoming County, so-so Upper Utica results, and “frac interactions” (better known as frac hits) between Lower Utica wells in Tioga County. The good news is that Seneca thinks it knows what went wrong, and it expects growth to resume in fiscal 2028.