Pennsylvania produced more than 7.8 trillion cubic feet of gas in 2025, accounting for roughly 16% of U.S. production and more than 5% of global production.
Ted Auch, 2022. Courtesy of FracTracker Alliance.
Overview
Gas production from wells drilled in 2016 declined by an average of 75.5% from peak production to 2025.
Pennsylvania’s conventional-well inventory includes tens of thousands of marginal or nonproducing wells: nearly 90% produced one barrel of oil equivalent per day or less, including 10,769 wells that reported no production. These wells present growing plugging, financial, and environmental liabilities.
If all gas produced in Pennsylvania in 2025 were combusted, it would generate an estimated 420 million metric tons of carbon dioxide equivalent, underscoring the substantial climate consequences of continued reliance on fracked gas.
Introduction
Pennsylvania produced more than 7.8 trillion cubic feet of gas in 2025 according to data from the Pennsylvania Department of Environmental Protection (DEP). This accounts for about 16.4% of all gas produced in the US and almost 5.3% of global gas production, using 2024 global numbers as a point of comparison. Nationally, Pennsylvania is the second leading producer of gas in the United States based on Energy Information Administration, (EIA).
Some Pennsylvania wells also produce liquid hydrocarbons. Pennsylvania operators reported almost 1.2 million barrels of oil and nearly 3.1 million barrels of condensate to DEP in 2025. EIA combines these liquids into a single category of crude oil. This places Pennsylvania much further down on the list, ranking behind seventeen other states and the federal waters in the Gulf of Mexico. This accounts for about 0.09% of national oil production and an insignificant fraction of global production.
Production
Discussion of Data Sources
It should be noted that EIA has its own production statistics for Pennsylvania that are slightly less than what DEP provides, both for gas and liquids, presumably because there have been some straggling operators that reported their production late. In fact, I downloaded the DEP production reports data twice, about a month apart, and noticed similar results. The data used in this section is from DEP, and was downloaded on March 21, 2026.
The DEP production reports allow for much greater granularity than the EIA numbers, as it contains per-well values for gas, oil, and condensate, as well as other information that allows us to analyze trends in more detail.
Condensate and Natural Gas Liquids
What is condensate? EIA defines lease condensate as, “Light liquid hydrocarbons recovered from lease separators or field facilities at associated and non-associated natural gas wells. Mostly pentanes and heavier hydrocarbons. Normally enters the crude oil stream after production.” Pentanes are hydrocarbons with five carbon atoms per molecule, making it heavier than methane (with just one carbon atom) but lighter than octane (eight carbon atoms), for example. In Pennsylvania, lease condensate has its own column in the production data as simply “condensate.”
Additional liquid hydrocarbons are removed from the gas stream at large facilities. EIA calls these hydrocarbons plant condensate, but at the well head, those are a part of the gas production, since they have not yet been removed from the gas stream.
Conventional and Unconventional Wells
Pennsylvania law defines two categories of oil and gas wells – conventional and unconventional. Conventional wells are generally small sites with a single well, distributed mostly in the western part of the state, sometimes in surprisingly high density. The first of these was the Drake Well, drilled before the Civil War, but wells in this category are still drilled today. Unconventional wells are what people think of as “fracking wells,” although the true definition is mostly based on the depth of the formation:
An unconventional gas well is a well that is drilled into an unconventional formation, which is defined as a geologic shale formation below the base of the Elk Sandstone or its geologic equivalent where natural gas generally cannot be produced except by horizontal or vertical well bores stimulated by hydraulic fracturing.
Pennsylvania requires that producing conventional wells report annually, while unconventional wells submit monthly reports. Therefore, there are 13 different reports for the calendar year, which we have combined into a single annual report, which can be downloaded here.
In both categories, wells that are not producing are also listed on the report, and operators are required to explain why a given well isn’t producing.
| Well Type | Well Count | Gas (Mcf) | Oil (Barrels) | Condensate (Barrels) |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Conventional | 79,836 | 64,987,296 | 1,017,896 | 17,550 |
| Unconventional | 13,691 | 7,772,431,190 | 173,212 | 3,073,546 |
| All Wells | 93,527 | 7,837,418,487 | 1,191,108 | 3,091,096 |
Table 1 – Summary of conventional and unconventional production values for Pennsylvania wells in 2025. Gas is reported in thousands of cubic feet (Mcf) and oil and condensate are reported in 42-gallon barrels. Based on data downloaded from Pennsylvania DEP on March 21, 2026.
More than 85% of the wells on the inventory are considered to be conventional, but over 99% of the state’s gas comes from unconventional wells. Oil quantities are proportional, with conventional wells accounting for 85% of oil production, matching their overall share of the well inventory. Similar to gas, over 99% of the condensate comes from unconventional wells.
How Much Energy is this?
To give some perspective, in 2025, residences in Pennsylvania burned 245.85 billion cubic feet of gas in 2025, which is a number on the high end of the spectrum in recent decades. Using that number, however, if the gas production were only going to Pennsylvania homes, the amount produced last year would last consumers for almost 32 years.
In terms of the liquids, the yields are more modest. EIA states that per 42-gallon barrel of crude oil, refineries produce about 19.5 gallons of gasoline and 11.5 gallons of diesel or heating oil. If we count the oil and condensate total, Pennsylvania wells reported producing 4,282,204 barrels of liquid hydrocarbons in 2025, which would yield around 83.5 million gallons of gasoline and 49.2 million gallons of diesel. EIA apparently stopped tracking state-level gasoline consumption in 2020, but at that point, Pennsylvanians were using 9,066,800 gallons of gasoline per day, meaning the in-state production of liquids in 2025 would last Pennsylvania drivers about 9 days for gasoline, not counting variables such as ethanol additives or the amount used for lawnmowers, generators, and other small engines. For diesel, Pennsylvania consumed 34,105,000 barrels of distillate fuel for transportation purposes in 2024, which works out to about 3.9 million gallons per day. The 2025 production would last Pennsylvanians about 12.5 days if it were only used for that purpose.
Of course, hydrocarbons do not stay within state or even national boundaries. Oil, gas, and derivative products are moved around in an enormous network of pipelines, railroads, and other modes of transportation. Some of Pennsylvania’s gas winds up at the Cove Point LNG Export Terminal, which can ship up to 1.8 Bcf per day of liquefied natural gas overseas.
Top Producing Wells
Oil and gas wells are highly variable in terms of production. The state’s largest gas producer last year was Palko J 006, an unconventional well in Lathrop Township, Susquehanna County, bringing about 12.76 billion cubic feet of fracked gas to the surface. The well, drilled in February 2024, is obviously in its peak performance period. Its production is equal to one-fifth of all 79,836 conventional wells combined. If all unconventional wells produced at this rate, it would only take 20 wells to fulfill that in-state residential consumption for a full year discussed above, but the real takeaway here is that this well is a significant outlier.
Although most of the oil in Pennsylvania is produced from conventional wells, the top producer in that category was the John McMurray WAS 1H unconventional well in Donegal Township, Washington County, reporting 47,254 barrels of oil. This well was drilled on March 30, 2024.
The top condensate producer is also in Donegal Township, the DMC Properties Unit 12H unconventional well, with 87,254 barrels. It’s located about 4.5 miles from the John McMurray well pad. This could indicate that there is not a lot of chemical difference between what is considered oil as opposed to condensate for the liquid hydrocarbons coming out of this wet gas portion of the Marcellus Shale in Washington County.
Variability by County
There are oil and gas wells in 36 of Pennsylvania’s 67 counties, but the resources are not distributed evenly. There are four counties that produced at least one Tcf of gas including Susquehanna (1.37 Tcf) and Bradford (1.17 Tcf) counties along the Northern Tier and Washington (1.15 Tcf) and Greene (1.14 Tcf) counties in the southwestern corner of the state.
Top oil producing counties include McKean (466,953 barrels) and Warren (285,482 barrels) in the northwestern portion of the state, followed by Washington (155,438 barrels) in the southwest. All of the oil from McKean and Warren are from conventional wells, whereas about 89.5% of the oil in Washington came from unconventional wells.
Washington County produced 2,518,434 barrels of condensate, about 81% of the statewide total. All but 1.11 barrels of this came from unconventional wells. Other significant condensate producers are Beaver (256,203 barrels) and Butler (252,440 barrels) counties north of Pittsburgh, both overwhelmingly from unconventional sources. In fact, less than 0.6% of condensate is from conventional wells, but the two largest producers in that category are Warren (11,545 barrels) and McKean (2,345 barrels) are the same two counties that lead the state in oil production.
For those interested in learning more about how production varies by county, feel free to look at this summary table by county. Note that there are separate tabs for conventional and unconventional wells.
5 Year Trend
The 7.84 Tcf of gas reported from Pennsylvania operators is up about 4.9% from the previous year’s levels. The production figures have bounced around a bit in recent years, however. For example, the 2025 totals are just 2.3% from the 2021 production numbers.
| Well Type | Total Gas – 2021 (Mcf) | Total Gas – 2022 (Mcf) | Total Gas – 2023 (Mcf) | Total Gas – 2024 (Mcf) | Total Gas – 2025 (Mcf) |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Conventional | 84,450,189 | 78,903,929 | 74,578,895 | 72,039,654 | 64,987,296 |
| Unconventional | 7,578,586,526 | 7,450,934,292 | 7,527,857,617 | 7,396,912,224 | 7,772,431,190 |
| All Wells | 7,663,036,715 | 7,529,838,221 | 7,602,436,512 | 7,468,951,878 | 7,837,418,487 |
Table 2 – Annual gas production from conventional and unconventional wells in Pennsylvania, 2021–2025. Conventional-well production declined by 23% over the five-year period, while unconventional production fluctuated and reached its highest level in 2025. Based on data downloaded from Pennsylvania DEP on March 21, 2026.
Unconventional Gas Decline
Generally speaking, oil and gas wells produce a lot of hydrocarbons at first, but those amounts decrease rapidly as the years go on. In order to have a more nuanced view of how this looks in Pennsylvania, we collected data from production reports over the past decade, selecting the 502 wells that are classified as unconventional and for which the spud date was in 2016. Four of these wells are listed as plugged, and none of those ever reported production, each in different counties and with different operators, so there is not clear pattern to this tiny subset. Two other wells are currently in regulatory inactive status after last producing in 2022. These are the Signore North Unit 4H and Signore North Unit 5H wells, both of which are operated in Elkland Township, Sullivan County by Chesapeake Appalachia, now a part of Expand Energy. The other 496 wells in this cohort have an active status. 22 of those didn’t produce any hydrocarbons in 2025, and 19 of those never reported any production over the ten-year period.
Since these wells are not reporting production and have an active status rather than inactive. It is not clear why these wells are not considered to be abandoned by the Commonwealth. Of course, it is also not possible to determine from the reports whether the wells are indeed non-producers or whether these wells represent data errors in these reports. For example, if the well API number was wrong in the initial 2016 report, then our attempts to match records for subsequent years could yield similar results. It’s worth reminding ourselves that bad source data is a potential factor in any analysis.
All Pennsylvania well status types are explained on pages 35-36 of the Oil and Gas Reports Data Dictionary.
The map above shows the average per-well production values for these wells by county for each of the ten years in that period. Even though we are only looking at wells drilled in 2016, it is clear from the data that not all of these wells went into production immediately. For example, in Wyoming County, the average production from this cohort was 0 Mcf in 2016, which spiked to 3,604,793 Mcf in 2018, before gradually falling to 543,233 Mcf in 2025, a decline of 84.9% from its peak. 2018 most likely represents the first full year of production for these wells.
This is a fairly typical pattern, with declines ranging from 53.2% for Butler County to 97.1% for Sullivan County. Statewide, the average production drop is 75.5% from the peak, with the production dropping from an average of about 1.8 Bcf in 2018 to 444 MMcf in 2025.
Conventional issue – Low-producing wells
While the state’s unconventional wells are generally highly productive, the same can not be said about those that are categorized as conventional wells in Pennsylvania. Wells that produce less than 15 BOE per day are considered stripper wells (sometimes also called marginal wells, although some in the industry use this term to discuss economic viability rather than a specific production threshold.) This production level is also important on a per-property basis, as the Internal Revenue Service has tax benefits for stripper well properties, in which all wells on a property must produce less than that amount in order to qualify for certain tax subsidies for the landowner. In this analysis, we are not taking land ownership into account, but we will put the conventional wells into five categories:
- No production
- Up to 1 BOE per Day (very low producing wells)
- More than 1 and up to 15 BOE per Day (stripper wells)
- More than 15 and up to 100 BOE per Day
- More than 100 BOE per Day
Figure 1 – Distribution of Pennsylvania’s conventional wells by average daily production category in 2025. Nearly 90% of the 79,836 wells reported either no production or production of one BOE per day or less. Based on data downloaded from Pennsylvania DEP on March 21, 2026.
Of the 79,836 conventional wells on the PA DEP 2025 production report, 10,769 (13.5%) reported no production at all, while another 61,070 (76.5%) produced a combination of gas and oil less than or equal to one BOE per day. 7,914 wells (9.9%) produce more than 1 BOE per day up to 15, still within that stripper well threshold. Only 82 (0.1%) of the state’s conventional wells produce more than that.
Bear in mind that even low-producing wells will have operating costs, including operating pump jacks, trucking out hydrocarbons and waste fluids, inspections, and other assorted maintenance. It is our view most or all of the 71,840 wells producing 1 BOE per day or less should be permanently plugged, although the collective plugging costs for that would of course be an astronomical addition to an already unmanageable problem. Pennsylvania could resolve this issue with a more responsible well bonding initiative, such as the one proposed in House Bill 364 in 2025.
Terms
Liquid Measurements (used for oil and condensate volumes)
- Barrel = 42 gallons
Gaseous Measurements (used to measure methane gas volumes)
- Mcf = Thousand cubic feet
- MMcf = Million cubic feet
- Bcf = Billion cubic feet
- Tcf = Trillion cubic feet
Other Terms
- BOE = Barrels of oil equivalent. Allows for discussion of production of both gas and oil, with 6 Mcf = 1 BOE
- BOE per Day = Average daily production of a well in terms of BOE
- CO2e = Carbon dioxide equivalent (used for atmospheric carbon pollution)
- Gas — In this article, “gas” refers to hydrocarbons that are gaseous at atmospheric pressure. Also called “natural gas.” Gasoline is a topic of discussion, but we refer to that specifically as gasoline, and not gas.
- Fracked Gas — Gas that was developed using wells that were hydraulically fractured, or fracked. In Pennsylvania, this generally refers to Unconventional wells, although Conventional wells are also often fracked, but at a smaller scale.
| Production Category | Abandoned | Active | DEP Abandoned List | DEP Orphan List | Operator Reported Not Drilled | Plugged OG Well | Regulatory Inactive Status | (empty) | Total |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| No Production | 2,590 | 7,864 | 1 | 255 | 58 | 1 | 10,769 | ||
| Up to 1 BOE per Day | 1,013 | 60,035 | 5 | 1 | 15 | 2 | 61,071 | ||
| More than 1 and up to 15 BOE per Day | 92 | 7,821 | 1 | 7,914 | |||||
| More than 15 and up to 100 BOE per Day | 72 | 72 | |||||||
| More than 100 BOE per Day | 10 | 10 | |||||||
| Totals | 3,695 | 75,802 | 6 | 1 | 1 | 270 | 60 | 1 | 79,836 |
Table 3 – Count of Pennsylvania conventional wells in 2025 by production category and well status. Note that only 270 wells have been plugged, even though 10,769 reported no production. Based on data downloaded from Pennsylvania DEP on March 21, 2026.
Very few of the wells on the report have been plugged – just 270, or 0.3%. This report does not contain plug dates, although it would seem reasonable if these were all plugged in the last year, as the tens of thousands of known plugged wells do not appear on this inventory.
Reasons for Non-Production
10,769 conventional wells reported no production in 2025, and operators are supposed to explain why given wells are not producing. This is a bit messy to evaluate because the report splits up the comments into two different fields, but we do not shy away from messy data here. One of the columns appears to be a drop-down list while the other is a free text field. Operators seem to fill out one or the other, or sometimes both. Operators have filled out at least one of these for 8,466 wells, although some of these are for wells that actually do show production.. Some of the explanations are not particularly helpful. For example, “Well temporarily not producing” comes up 4,075 times from the drop-down list, but offers no explanation as to why, unless the operator chose to do so in the free-text field. Some common themes on the free-text answers are variants of, “This is no longer our well,” “Well is for home use,” or “Well plugged.” Some of these transactions appear to have happened decades ago, according to the data.
| No Production Comment (Drop-Down List) | Abandoned | Active | DEP Abandoned List | Plugged OG Well | Regulatory Inactive Status | (empty) | Total Wells |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Abandoned well | 151 | 123 | 1 | 275 | |||
| Gas storage well | 3 | 1,196 | 1,199 | ||||
| Injection well | 26 | 1 | 27 | ||||
| Observation Well | 4 | 163 | 167 | ||||
| Plugged well | 84 | 327 | 1 | 228 | 640 | ||
| Regulatory Inactive Well | 46 | 46 | |||||
| Sold this well | 4 | 230 | 234 | ||||
| This is not our well | 16 | 257 | 273 | ||||
| Well spud, drilling not completed | 72 | 72 | |||||
| Well Temporarily Not Producing | 1,951 | 2,073 | 6 | 11 | 4,041 | ||
| (empty) | 377 | 3,397 | 20 | 1 | 3,795 | ||
| Total Result | 2,590 | 7,864 | 1 | 255 | 58 | 1 | 10,769 |
Table 4 – Operator-reported reasons for nonproduction among 10,769 conventional Pennsylvania wells that reported no gas, oil, or condensate production in 2025, organized by well status. “Well Temporarily Not Producing” was the most common response, while 3,795 wells had no reason selected from DEP’s drop-down list. Based on data downloaded from Pennsylvania DEP on March 21, 2026.
Note that there are 3,795 wells that did not explain non-production in the drop-down list. We have filtered those for the free-text field, and found that 3,696 (97%) of the wells are unexplained in that category as well, with most of the remainder listed as a house gas well.
Conclusion
While production varies wildly from well to well, there are a few trends in Pennsylvania that are apparent. The state’s industrial-scaled unconventional wells are the driving force of gas and condensate production, producing about 99% of the state totals in both categories despite only about 15% of the wells being categorized as unconventional. Conventional wells, on the other hand, account for about 85% of the state total oil production, matching their share of total wells. The distinction between oil and condensate appears to be a bit fluid (if you’ll pardon the pun) based on totals from specific areas that are high-producers in each category.
The amount of gas produced in Pennsylvania is very high, with 7.84 Tcf representing more than 5% of the global total production. As drilling in the Marcellus ramped up, gas was often spoken of as a so-called bridge fuel, weaning the nation off of coal and somehow preparing us for an even cleaner future. Gas did, in fact, surpass coal as the primary fuel used by electricity generators back in 2016, but the climate implications of the switch are somewhere between questionable and counterproductive. And this bridge seems to go on forever. At the utility scale, gas generated 8.5 times as much electricity as solar in 2024, along with 7.7 times as much as hydroelectric, and about 3.6 times as much as other forms of renewable energy, including wind.
And while climate issues have taken a backseat in the current political climate in Washington, the global temperature continues to rise. 7.84 trillion cubic feet of gas represents an incredible amount of carbon molecules migrating from deep underground all the way to the earth’s atmosphere. A single Mcf of gas being combusted yields 0.05 metric tons of carbon dioxide equivalent to the atmosphere. If all of the gas were combusted (meaning no leaks or venting), then the gas produced in Pennsylvania in 2025 added 420,047,518 metric tons of carbon dioxide equivalent (CO2e) to the atmosphere, the equivalent emissions of more than one trillion road miles from the average gasoline-powered car. Mitigation efforts like carbon capture and storage are unproven and are unlikely to substantially help the problem.
There is a solution, however: as a society, we must simply use less gas. Unfortunately, state and federal policy makers have largely accommodated the rapid expansion of the technology sector and its unrelenting demand for new data centers, facilities that continue to rely heavily on Pennsylvania’s fracked gas and diesel backup generators. While these production levels are often celebrated as economic milestones, they represent a mounting climate debt. If the current trajectory holds and Pennsylvania’s gas remains the default answer to this new energy demand, the next review of these statewide production numbers will inevitably yield more drilling, representing more atmospheric carbon, and even less time to course-correct if we want to avoid the most intense climate impacts.
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