PA-OH-WV Shale Permits Oct 12-18: 12 New Wells, 19 Older-Well Moves
The Marcellus/Utica region received 12 new shale well permits last week, October 12-18, up 3 from 9 the week before. Pennsylvania issued 9 of the new permits. Ohio issued 2. And West Virginia issued a single new permit. The drillers who received new-well permits last week were: Antero Resources, Ascent Resources, Expand Energy, Range Resources, and Seneca Resources. Before we go further, a quick housekeeping note: Starting this week, MDN counts only permits for brand-new wells in the headline number. State agencies also issue renewals (more time to drill a well that was already permitted), modifications (changes to a well that was already permitted, like a new wellbore path), and in Ohio, “deepen” permits. Those wells were already counted the first time around, so counting them again would double-count. We now list them separately, in their own section below. Read More “PA-OH-WV Shale Permits Oct 12-18: 12 New Wells, 19 Older-Well Moves”
Allegheny County, home to Pittsburgh, just became the first county in the nation to force private employers to pay for 12 weeks of parental leave — at up to 100% of wages, with the employer footing the entire bill. County Executive Sara Innamorato signed the regulation yesterday, two days after County Council approved it 11-4. Here’s what caught our eye (thanks to a heads-up from PIOGA): the mandate doesn’t care where your headquarters is. If you’re a driller or service company with 15 or more employees anywhere, and one of your employees works 80 hours in Allegheny County in a year, that worker is covered. 
Another one bites the dust in northeastern Pennsylvania. On Wednesday night, Archbald Borough Council (Lackawanna County) voted 7-0 to deny a zoning request for the Wildcat Ridge Data Center Campus, a 14-building AI “hyperscale” project proposed for roughly 575 acres on the mountainside above Business Route 6. The campus would have needed 1.6 gigawatts (GW) of electricity, more than 3.3 million gallons of water per day in summer, and 588 diesel-powered backup generators. About 175-200 residents packed the borough building’s gym and erupted in cheers when the vote came down. The developer, Brooklyn-based Cornell Realty Management, isn’t talking, but just about everyone in the room expects an appeal to county court. Why should Marcellus folks care? Because 1.6 GW of new, around-the-clock electric demand is, in our neck of the woods, a gas demand story. 
Yesterday, the Pennsylvania Department of Environmental Protection (DEP) threw another party, this time to celebrate the 500th orphan and abandoned well plugged since Josh Shapiro became governor in January 2023. Good for them. Seriously. But we can’t help noticing that Ohio plugged 480 orphan wells in 2025 alone, nearly as many as PA has plugged in almost four years. From 2023 through 2025, Ohio plugged 1,215 old wells. That’s 2.4 times PA’s entire Shapiro-era total, and it doesn’t count a single well Ohio has plugged so far in 2026. 
Here’s a sentence we never thought we’d write: Qatar is buying American LNG. Qatar sits on top of the world’s largest natural gas field and, until this year, was one of the two or three biggest LNG exporters on the planet. Yet this week Cheniere Energy announced two long-term deals to supply state-owned QatarEnergy with 4 million tonnes per annum (mtpa) of LNG through 2054. Half of it will come from Cheniere’s Sabine Pass export plant in Louisiana. And Sabine Pass is a place where Marcellus/Utica gas has been showing up for years. Translation: some of the gas drilled in PA, OH, and WV will very likely end up owned by a Middle East country, which will resell it around the world. Who’d a thunk it? 
There’s a new sheriff in town. Well, technically a retired police chief. On Thursday evening (Oct. 22), more than 150 residents gathered in Penn Township, Westmoreland County, for the kickoff of the Citizens Energy Council (CEC), a grassroots group that supports natural gas drilling and openly pushes back against the anti-fossil fuel activists who have dominated township meetings in this part of Pennsylvania for more than a decade. CEC’s leader, former Penn Township Police Chief John Otto, summed up the group’s message in three words: “Enough is enough.” Music to our ears! 
Here’s a rare thing in Washington: a bill that passed both the House and Senate without a fight, helps drillers, and doesn’t cost taxpayers a dime. On Tuesday, President Trump signed the License to Drill Act into law. The new law keeps alive a 20-year-old program called the Permit Processing Improvement Fund (PPIF). Under the PPIF, drillers who want to drill on federal land pay a fee for each drilling permit application, and that money goes to pay the federal workers who process those permits. The program was set to expire on Sept. 30, but now runs through fiscal year 2037. Most of the action is out West. But with the first federal leases in Ohio’s Wayne National Forest in nearly a decade now in drillers’ hands, it matters a little bit here too. 
OTHER U.S. REGIONS: New Jersey’s RGGI leakage warning applies to New York too; A fuel cell energy project is in the works for Buchanan County; New York’s fracking ban leaves community to crumble while Pa. neighbors boom with gas millions; NATIONAL: U.S. natural gas futures edge up after storage data; USA crude oil stocks drop 3MM barrels WoW; U.S. refineries have been running at very high rates in 2026; VettaFi sees 40% North American natural gas demand growth over next decade; INTERNATIONAL: Oil surges 4% after deadly Saudi attacks; Saudi Aramco evacuates HQ. 
Kinder Morgan, the country’s biggest natural gas pipeline operator (it moves about 40% of all the gas produced in the U.S.), reported record third-quarter results yesterday. Nice for shareholders. But the real news for MDN readers is buried in the project list. Kinder’s Southern Natural Gas (SNG) unit has made a final investment decision (FID) to build the Southeast Connector, a 2.6 Bcf/d (billion cubic feet per day) pipeline the company says will deliver “abundant Marcellus/Utica supply” to the Southeast. And Kinder’s Tennessee Gas Pipeline (TGP) says its proposed 219 South project, which would also move M-U gas south, drew four times more interest than the capacity it offered. Translation: the South wants our gas, and Kinder is building the straws. 
The Homer City Energy Campus in Indiana County, PA — the largest natural gas-fired power plant under construction anywhere in the U.S. — just ticked off a few nice milestones. Construction contractor Kiewit marked one year on the job, the workforce has topped 2,000, and the first of seven giant gas turbines is now sitting on its foundation. Meanwhile, Amazon’s plan to build 36 data centers next door is officially on the county’s review clock; the Department of Environmental Protection (DEP) just held a hearing on the plant’s water discharge permit, and the usual suspects are still fighting the plant’s air permit. Here’s where things stand. 
NextEra Energy, the largest electric power company in North America (and parent of Florida Power & Light), reported third-quarter 2026 results yesterday. Adjusted earnings came in at $2.592 billion ($1.24 per share), up 9.7% per share from a year ago. But the real news came during the Q&A with Wall Street analysts. Just two days earlier, Virginia regulators’ own staff recommended denying NextEra’s $67 billion takeover of Dominion Energy as proposed—and Gov. Abigail Spanberger demanded a six-year rate freeze. NextEra CEO John Ketchum didn’t blink, saying he looks forward to “prosecuting this case.” Meanwhile, NextEra keeps going deeper into natural gas: more than 18 gigawatts (GW) of its 20+ GW of data center power projects are gas-fired, including a giant gas plant in Fayette County, PA. And NextEra has spent more than $1 billion this year buying into shale wells. Not bad for a company that once said it was getting out of gas! 
So much for the charm offensive. Five weeks after NextEra Energy and Dominion Energy sweetened their $67 billion merger with bigger bill credits, 1,000 new jobs and a shiny new Richmond office tower (see 
One year ago today, we told you construction had started on Enbridge’s 122-mile Ridgeline Expansion Project in Tennessee (see 
The Upper Burrell Township (Westmoreland County, PA) Planning Commission voted 5-0 Tuesday night to recommend the township’s data center ordinance, handing it to the three township supervisors. The supervisors hold a public hearing at 6 p.m. tonight (Oct. 22), followed by a special meeting to consider adopting it. They’re racing the clock: the township’s data center moratorium expires Nov. 2, just 11 days from now. Last month we told you the draft quietly requires every new data center to make its own around-the-clock (“baseload”) power, which in southwest Pennsylvania means natural gas. As best we can tell, that requirement survived. 
DNV, the Norway-based testing, certification, and risk management company, recently released its 10th annual Energy Transition Outlook (ETO). MDN has written about these outlooks before, and they usually read like a slow-motion obituary for fossil fuels. Not so much this year, at least for natural gas. DNV raised its long-term forecast for global gas demand, flipped its forecast for North American gas production from decline to growth, and says the U.S. and Canada are now the world’s biggest gas exporters, “the first time in the modern LNG era.” DNV still predicts gas will lose most of its role in power generation by mid-century, which we take issue with below.