“Top 5” Shareholder in Devon Energy Pushes Company to Sell Itself
Devon Energy completed its merger with Coterra Energy just over one month ago, on May 7, paying Coterra $21.4 billion in Devon stock (see Devon and Coterra Complete Merger, Launches $8B Buyback Program). It’s been no secret that one of the larger investors in Coterra and Devon (owning about 1.4% of Devon’s stock), so-called activist investor Kimmeridge, lobbied Coterra prior to the merger to sell off its Marcellus assets (see Activist Investor Declares Coterra Merger Failed – Sell Marcellus). Kimmeridge has some new company. Another so-called activist investor, TOMS Capital Investment Management, recently invested big money in the combined Devon (now a “top 5” investor in Devon) and is pressuring the recently merged company to sell assets and (in a complete surprise), consider selling itself! Just a month after merging! Read More ““Top 5” Shareholder in Devon Energy Pushes Company to Sell Itself”
This is one of those “man bites dog” (or in this case, “woman” bites dog) stories. Rebecca Tepper has, for years, worked for Maura Healey—first when Healey was Attorney General of Massachusetts, and later (now) in Healey’s role as Governor of the state. Tepper is Healey’s Secretary of Energy and Environmental Affairs. Healey is her boss and directs the policies that Tepper executes. So it was a complete shock for us to receive an email from Tepper’s office with a letter attached (see it below) that Tepper sent to Dan Dolan, President of the New England Power Generators Association. The letter encourages (we’d call it demands) New England’s power generators to sign up to receive natural gas during Enbridge’s open season for the recently announced Project Beacon. 
Norway’s Equinor (formerly Statoil) held its Capital Markets Day 2026 on Tuesday, offering investors and analysts a chance to hear directly from the company’s top management and ask questions. The event made clear that, while the Norwegian Continental Shelf (NCS) remains the company’s center of gravity, its Appalachian (Marcellus) gas position is being repositioned from a quiet, low-cost cash-flow engine into a strategic linchpin connecting upstream gas to the fast-growing U.S. power and data-center economy. Equinor is in love with the Marcellus. 
EQT Corp’s mixed-index natural gas product blends NYMEX Henry Hub futures with one or more physical basin indices (such as Dominion South) into a single sales contract, often weighted toward Henry Hub for hedging liquidity. Splitting exposure between national futures and local spot dynamics dilutes price swings, helping power generators, LNG exporters, and large industrials reduce earnings volatility while retaining some upside from favorable regional spreads. 
Pennsylvania’s Senate Republicans are speaking truth to power, calling out PA Democrat Governor Josh Shapiro’s policies as one of the primary reasons why PA residents pay more for electricity. And Joshie doesn’t like being called out. State Senate President Pro Tempore Kim Ward argues the state is losing out under a roughly $325-per-megawatt-day price cap on PJM Interconnection’s capacity auctions, approved by the federal government after a lawsuit by Gov. Josh Shapiro (see 
Invenergy announced Wednesday it is surrendering offshore wind leases in New Jersey, New York, California, and Maine, pivoting instead to natural gas and geothermal projects. Under a settlement with the Justice and Interior Departments, the Chicago-based developer will receive a $765 million partial refund (money it paid the government for the leases) and will invest in gas-fired plants in Indiana, Wisconsin, Iowa, Kansas, and Missouri, as well as Western geothermal projects. Big Wind is out, natgas is in! Wow, what a change. 
OTHER U.S. REGIONS: Can New York compete in the AI economy while banning fracking?; NATIONAL: U.S. natural gas futures snap winning streak; Anthropic, Google, other Big Tech cos. commit $915M to pull carbon out of the sky; Independent power market analysis confirms concerns about RGGI; The Pickens Plan revisited; INTERNATIONAL: Crude stabilizes after sharp selloff; US, Iran peace pact takes effect; Qatar prepares LNG comeback ahead of Hormuz reopening; The oil shortage is ending — and now comes the glut; Climate crusader blames media for lack of support; Carney says he had several talks with Trump during G7 despite no official meeting; A commonsense worldwide energy movement is on the ascent. 
Rising natural gas demand across the U.S. Northeast and adjacent southern and western regions is driving a wave of pipeline projects that will let Marcellus/Utica producers boost output into the 2030s. A fourth installment of RBN’s series about gas market dynamics in the Northeast groups the planned expansions into five buckets: Pennsylvania projects, regionwide enhancements, MVP/Transco-tied projects, expanded Ohio capacity, and more distant related efforts. Highlights include National Fuel Gas’s Pennsylvania builds, Enbridge’s TETCO “Appalachia to Market II” upgrades that add compression and looping, and the MVP Boost Project, which expands Mountain Valley Pipeline from 2 Bcf/d to 2.6 Bcf/d by mid-2028 (via additional West Virginia and Virginia compression). 
In February, MDN told you about the Kriley v. XTO Energy lawsuit (see 
In February 2024, members of the South Carolina Public Service Commission (PSC) approved a proposed project to build a 1,020-megawatt (MW) gas-fired power plant in the state’s Lowcountry, in Colleton County (see 
Owensboro (KY) Municipal Utilities (OMU) is studying a proposed 545-megawatt natural gas power plant on roughly 30 acres at the former Elmer Smith Station site along the Ohio River, where coal generation ended in 2020. The developer, Green River East GenCo, holds an option to lease and has filed a grid interconnection application. OMU hired GDS Associates for a six-month study funded by the developer. OMU General Manager Tim Lyons stressed that the early-stage project isn’t guaranteed and that OMU won’t own the roughly $1 billion plant, citing customer risk. Instead, the plant may pursue power purchase agreements ahead of joining the MISO market in 2027. The plant will employ 15–20 workers. 
Pennsylvania has become a hotspot for data center proposals, prompting community backlash, writes Penn State law professor Michael Helbing, whose hometown is Archbald, PA, a suburb of Scranton. You may recall that last week we wrote about another Scranton suburb (virtually next door to Archbald, see the map) by the name of Olyphant, and how the leaders of that borough had developed zoning regulations to protect residents yet allow data center projects to proceed (see 
Yesterday, the Pennsylvania Public Utility Commission (PUC) announced the distribution of $243,877,400 in natural gas impact fees collected from producers for the 2025 reporting year, a whopping 48% increase over 2024. The reason for the big increase was the higher price that natural gas fetched last year and a significant uptick in the number of new wells drilled. This year’s distribution brings the cumulative total of impact fees collected and distributed since 2012 to more than $3.12 billion! 
Three months ago (March 2026), MDN reported on a northeastern Pennsylvania landowner from Luzerne County who sold his farm to an AI data center project and overnight became a multimillionaire (see