OpenAI Signs 10 GW Ohio Data Center Lease, Utica Gas Wins Big
It’s official. In June, we told you OpenAI was in “advanced negotiations” to lease the gargantuan 10-gigawatt (GW) data center campus rising on federal land in Piketon (Pike County), Ohio (see OpenAI in Talks to Lease OH Data Center, Largest Gas Power in U.S.). Yesterday, the Wall Street Journal reported the ink is dry. OpenAI has signed a 20-year lease for the whole 10 GW campus with SB Energy, the SoftBank subsidiary developing the site — and chipmaker Nvidia is standing behind the deal with a financial backstop worth up to $105 billion. Why should Utica landowners care about a Silicon Valley lease? Because the electricity feeding this monster comes from a 9.2-GW natural gas power plant, and that gas has to come from somewhere. That somewhere is under your feet. Read More “OpenAI Signs 10 GW Ohio Data Center Lease, Utica Gas Wins Big”
Devon Energy just told the market it’s willing to write big checks to get stranded natural gas to better markets. The gas in question is in West Texas, not Susquehanna County — and that says something about where the old Cabot Oil & Gas assets stand in the new Devon. On Monday, Devon announced a positive Final Investment Decision (FID — meaning the money is committed and the shovels are coming) on the Solitude Pipeline System, a WhiteWater-led joint venture building two 48-inch natural gas pipelines from the Permian Basin to Katy, Texas. 
In March, MDN told you that Butler County landowners were appealing after a federal judge tossed their royalty class action against XTO Energy (see 
Net Power, backed by the Rice brothers (of Rice Energy and EQT fame), has spent years chasing the holy grail of natural gas power: a plant that burns gas and emits essentially zero carbon dioxide. Last year the company backed off that goal and pivoted to post-combustion carbon capture (PCC), which grabs about 90% of the CO2 using off-the-shelf technology. Close enough, the market said. Last week, Net Power pivoted again — and this one’s a doozy. The first phase of its flagship West Texas project will now be built with no carbon capture at all. Just a gas plant. Meanwhile, the company took a $193.7 million charge to write its original Allam Cycle technology and its La Porte demonstration plant down to zero. 
The independent watchdog that grades the PJM electric grid put out its half-year report card last Thursday under the cheerful headline “Market Monitor Finds PJM Wholesale Electricity Markets Competitive.” Read down three paragraphs, and you find the opposite — the capacity market flunked, three years running, and the Monitor blames data centers. Buried further still is a number that ought to end a certain argument in Harrisburg for good: the biggest single driver of PJM’s price spike wasn’t natural gas. It was the wires. 
A free-market think tank in New Jersey has published a report that says out loud what MDN readers figured out years ago: the Garden State keeps its lights on with natural gas — a lot of it, Marcellus gas — while chasing a 2035 clean-electricity mandate propped up by offshore wind that does not exist and batteries that have barely been built. The report, Reliability Before Retirement: Reassessing New Jersey’s 2024 Energy Master Plan, comes from the Garden State Initiative (GSI), a Morristown-based nonprofit that pushes free-market policy in one of the least free-market states in America. Author Anurag Bhat is no fracking cheerleader — he’s a sustainability-credentialed analyst who co-wrote GSI’s 2025 critique of the same Energy Master Plan (EMP). Which makes the findings that much more useful to us. 
On July 1, MDN told you Golden Pass LNG had gone dark — three cargoes out the door and then, on June 29, almost no feedgas flowing into the plant at all (see 
OTHER U.S. REGIONS: Duke Energy’s SC plan backs growth, delivers customer value; Waterborne shipments from the U.S. Gulf Coast increased in April and May; NY’s 18 proposed battery plants will mostly charge from natural gas; With new Permian takeaway capacity coming online, gas production could soar; NATIONAL: U.S. natural gas futures settle lower; NAS takes down climate science chapter amid accusations of bias…for now; Hydrogen is not market ready; INTERNATIONAL: Oil advances as Iran tensions persist; USA-Iran peace prospects dim; Why has oil not rallied to $150 or higher?; A global forecaster’s perspective on global temperature; Turns out fossil fuels are Earth’s ‘Miracle-Gro’. 
Competitive Power Ventures (CPV) and EQT Corporation have signed a 10-year gas supply agreement that locks up the entire fuel appetite of the CPV Shay Energy Center, the $3 billion, 2,100-megawatt (MW) combined-cycle plant headed for Doddridge County, West Virginia. It’s the deal that turns Shay from a project on paper into a project with a fuel contract. 
Virginia’s environmental cops have hit Transcontinental Gas Pipe Line Company (Transco) with a $179,068.50 civil charge over erosion and sediment control violations on the Pittsylvania County stretch of the Southeast Supply Enhancement (SSE) Project — the single most important new outlet for Marcellus/Utica gas heading south. 
Something happened over the past ten days that ought to look awfully familiar to anyone who was around Marcellus country in 2009. A single advocacy shop dug a permit out of a state filing cabinet, handed it to a friendly reporter at the New York Times, and within a week roughly two dozen outlets were running the same three sentences about Amazon becoming “the largest single source of pollution in the United States.” It’s not a coincidence, it’s not organic, and it’s not staying in Texas. Big Green has told us, in print, that the data center fight is the anti-fracking playbook run a second time — and one of the projects already on their list belongs to Williams, in Ohio, burning Utica gas. 
Both federal and state regulators signed off last Thursday on PowerTransitions’ purchase of the 1,242-megawatt (MW) Roseton Generating Facility in Newburgh, New York — the sixth and by far the largest gas-fired plant the Houston-based company has grabbed in the Empire State this year. The Federal Energy Regulatory Commission (FERC) issued its order Aug. 13 (Docket EC26-95-000), and the New York Public Service Commission approved the transfer the same day. But the most interesting thing in the FERC order isn’t the approval. It’s the name of the company doing the buying. 
Epsilon Energy (NASDAQ: EPSN), the non-op partner that bankrolls a chunk of Expand Energy’s Marcellus drilling in Susquehanna County, PA, reported Q2 2026 results last week showing Pennsylvania gas production down sharply — but for a reason that’s actually good news for the wells coming next. Epsilon also sold off a package of small Marcellus overriding royalty interests for $3.9 million and confirmed five new wells are headed for completion by December, which should boost both production and Auburn Gas Gathering System throughput. 
PJM Interconnection, the grid operator that keeps the lights on for 67 million people across 13 states including Pennsylvania, Ohio, and West Virginia, filed its long-awaited data center framework with the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission (FERC) on Wednesday, August 13. The short version: if you’re a new data center and you don’t bring your own electricity to the party, you get switched off first when the grid gets tight. Homes and small businesses get cut last. It’s a rule that, read correctly, is one enormous purchase order for Marcellus/Utica gas. 
The rest of the country is drilling. We’re not. Well, at least not as much. The Marcellus/Utica held flat at 35 rigs for a second straight week — the lowest count on our 52-week chart — while the national count added five rigs to hit 593, the highest since March 2025. Pennsylvania stayed at 16 rigs, Ohio at 10, West Virginia at 9. Nobody moved. Meanwhile, the Haynesville, our chief rival for gas-directed capital, tacked on three more rigs to reach 59. 
Here’s a puzzle for you. The Trump EPA has spent 18 months dismantling the Biden administration’s carbon rules for power plants. The final repeal has been parked at the White House Office of Management and Budget since May 14 — and as of this writing it’s still sitting there, past the 90-day review window that ran out on August 12. Everybody in the business assumes it’s a done deal. So why are state regulators still writing those very same carbon limits into brand-new permits for brand-new gas plants — including two projects that will burn Marcellus and Utica gas?