Marcellus/Utica Permits Rebound to 21 as EQT, Coterra Pad Up in Pennsylvania

The Marcellus/Utica basin logged 21 new shale well permits for the week of Nov. 2–8, up 17 from just four the prior week. Pennsylvania issued 15, Ohio issued five and West Virginia issued one, according to weekly state permit data.

Pennsylvania did the heavy lifting. EQT Corp. and Coterra Energy each picked up seven permits for a single pad apiece — a 14-permit combined haul that signals superpad development, not scattered appraisal (a superpad hosts multiple horizontal wells sharing one surface location).

Who got what, and where?

The five operators receiving new-well permits last week:

• EQT Corp. — seven permits on a single Pennsylvania pad
• Coterra Energy — seven permits on a single Pennsylvania pad; Coterra absorbed Cabot Oil & Gas in the 2021 merger
• EOG Resources — five new-well permits in Ohio, filed Nov. 5
• Antero Resources — at least one permit across the tri-state footprint
• CNX Resources — at least one permit across the tri-state footprint

Counties tagged to the week's activity include Armstrong, Greene, Susquehanna and Westmoreland in Pennsylvania; Guernsey, Harrison and Carroll in Ohio; and Ritchie and Wetzel in West Virginia.

Ohio's goose egg didn't last. After a zero-permit week, EOG's five filings on Nov. 5 restored the Utica's Ohio side to the ledger. Devon Energy also appears in the week's operator list — a wrinkle worth noting, since Coterra's permits are logged under the "now Devon Energy" flag in the data, a labeling point the permit tracker itself flags. Treat the Coterra-Devon attribution accordingly.

That's the caveat on the operator roll: the data does not break out how many permits Antero, CNX or Devon individually received. Only EQT, Coterra and EOG carry firm counts. Everything else is presence, not volume.

What happened to older permits?

Regulators recorded 14 actions on previously issued permits. Nine of those actions touched one EQT pad in Wetzel County, W.Va., on the West Virginia side of the play. That kind of paperwork cluster usually means modifications, extensions or unit revisions — the data does not specify which. So read it as administrative churn, not nine new wells.

Does one week make a trend?

No. The prior week's four permits looked alarming; this week's 21 looks healthy. Neither reading holds up on its own. Weekly permit counts in the Marcellus/Utica swing hard because a single superpad filing can drop a dozen permits into one seven-day window. EQT and Coterra's paired seven-permit pads did exactly that this week.

What the numbers do show: the basin's biggest gas producers — EQT and Coterra — are still sanctioning pad-scale work in Pennsylvania, and EOG is committing to Ohio acreage it entered more recently. Appalachia's permit engine runs in bursts, and last week was a burst.

Takeaway: 21 permits, 14 of them on two Pennsylvania pads, tells you activity is concentrating on fewer, bigger drilling sites. The watch item is next week's count — whether the two-pad pattern repeats or the basin falls back toward single digits.