Deep Utica Well Still Flowing 42 MMcf/d After 10 Months
The operator roundtable at THE SUMMIT: Appalachia on July 28 put three very different companies on the same stage — EQT, the biggest gas producer in the country; PennEnergy Resources, a private driller running three-quarters of a Bcf/d north of Pittsburgh; and Huntley & Huntley, an Armstrong County outfit that’s been at this since 1912. What came out of it was the most technically useful hour of the day: hard numbers on deep Utica well performance, a clear-eyed look at stacking the Upper Devonian, and a warning about who the antis are coming for next. MDN was an advertising partner for the event and obtained the transcripts with the organizer’s permission. This is the third of four articles chronicling the event. Yesterday we brought you EQT’s correction of the record (see EQT Exec Corrects the Record: We Never Said 100 Bcf/d of Demand). On Monday, we brought you comments made by former Senator Joe Manchin (see Manchin Tells Pittsburgh Crowd He Wrote the IRA in Secret). Tomorrow, our final installment will share with you which state mineral buyers say is “easy pickings.” Don’t miss it! Read More “Deep Utica Well Still Flowing 42 MMcf/d After 10 Months”
Infinity Natural Resources (INR), the Morgantown, WV-based pureplay Marcellus/Utica driller, dropped its second quarter 2026 numbers on Monday and walked analysts through them Tuesday morning. The short version: production jumped 75% year over year to 348.5 million cubic feet equivalent per day (MMcfe/d), adjusted EBITDAX hit a company-record $114.7 million, the first wells from the Ohio Utica package INR bought from Antero came online ahead of plan — and INR quietly drilled and cored its first deep dry gas Utica well in Pennsylvania. Full-year guidance was reaffirmed. Not a bad quarter for a company that was still private 18 months ago. 
Babcock & Wilcox — the 159-year-old boiler maker headquartered in Akron, Ohio — announced yesterday that it signed an agreement with Siemens Energy to start work on 20 steam turbine generator sets totaling 1 gigawatt (GW) of capacity for gas-fired data center projects. Here’s the part that caught our eye: B&W hasn’t announced signed customers for all of them. The company is buying the factory slots first and lining up buyers second. That’s a real bet on gas-fired power demand — and it’s being made by a company sitting right on top of the Utica. 
A Nasdaq-listed company you’ve almost certainly never heard of says it has signed a binding term sheet to buy roughly 1,800 acres of unleased Marcellus mineral rights in “northern Pennsylvania,” drill a dozen wells on it, burn the gas in on-site turbines, and run a 200-megawatt AI data center behind the meter — with a stretch goal of 1 gigawatt. The company, Alpha Compute Corp. (Nasdaq: ALP), never says which county. We think we’ve figured it out: Tioga County. Here’s what’s actually known, what we deduced, and what nobody should be printing as fact yet. 
America’s biggest LNG exporter just had a monster quarter — and raised its full-year forecast for the second time this year. Cheniere Energy (NYSE: LNG) shipped 184 cargoes in the second quarter and is now building toward a platform that could eventually swallow more than 10 billion cubic feet of gas a day. Appalachian producers should be paying attention. Cheniere Energy reported second quarter 2026 results on Aug. 6, and the numbers were eye-popping. Revenues hit $5.73 billion, up 24% from a year ago. Consolidated adjusted EBITDA came in at $1.80 billion, up 27%. Net income was $3.07 billion, up 89% — though a big chunk of that is non-cash accounting noise we’ll get to in a minute. 
Devon Energy and Williams spent the last week of July doing something that doesn’t show up on a reserve report: teaching northeastern Pennsylvania teenagers how the gas business actually works. Then, on July 30, the Pennsylvania Chamber Foundation named both companies “Greatest Places to Intern in PA.” Six days later, Devon CEO Clay Gaspar told analysts he’s fielding “no shortage of incoming phone calls” about which assets he might sell — with the Marcellus at the top of everybody’s list. Which raises a question nobody on Wall Street is asking: who inherits the workforce machine? 
MARCELLUS/UTICA REGION: Southwestern Pennsylvania officials visit ‘Data Center Alley’ amid local development boom; Re-assessing RPS critical to address energy affordability challenges; OTHER U.S. REGIONS: Data-center backlash leads to new land rush in Texas oil patch; Court orders pause Mass. data center expansion; NATIONAL: U.S. natural gas futures give back some gains; Trump extends narrowed waiver of Jones Act shipping mandates; Back to school hits the gas; Senators outline future of permitting talks; INTERNATIONAL: Oil extends gains on Hormuz uncertainty; A dozen ships switch oil outside Hormuz; US shale expertise puts Australia’s Beetaloo on the map; AI will boost oil and gas production more than green energy, report finds; Mexico won’t frac all their basins, yet they keep importing U.S. gas; Is Europe on the brink of another natural gas crisis? 
If you’ve been to an energy conference in the last year, you’ve heard someone say EQT is forecasting 100 Bcf/d of new natural gas demand by 2030. It happened at 
We missed one, and it’s a big one. On July 31, the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission (FERC) handed Kinder Morgan certificates of public convenience and necessity for BOTH of its blockbuster Southeast projects — the Mississippi Crossing Project (MSX) on Tennessee Gas Pipeline, and the South System Expansion 4 Project (SSE4) on Southern Natural Gas and Elba Express. Put together, that’s roughly 500 miles of new steel, about $5.2 billion of capital, and something on the order of 3.8 million dekatherms per day of new firm transportation capacity aimed squarely at the fastest-growing gas market in the country. FERC issued the order right on time — the FAST-41 schedule said “no later than July 31,” and the Commission delivered on the last possible day. 
One of the biggest landowner-vs.-driller cases in Ohio shale history just ended — with no verdict, no dollar figure, and a two-page piece of paper. On July 29, a group of Belmont County mineral owners and Rice Drilling D LLC (owned by EQT) jointly asked a federal judge to throw out the case for good, roughly two months after it was supposed to go in front of a jury. Eight years, 580 docket entries, and one of the most consequential lease questions in the Utica — settled behind closed doors. 
Northern Oil & Gas (NOG) is a Minnesota company most people file under “Bakken,” so its quarterly report doesn’t usually land on our radar. It should have. NOG is the largest publicly traded non-operator in the country — it buys minority working interests and lets somebody else run the rig — and after last week’s second quarter release, Appalachia is its biggest gas engine. Marcellus-Utica volumes set another company record, and CEO Nick O’Grady said NOG has quietly spent north of $100 million buying Utica drilling locations in the past year, with lease bonuses up “50-plus percent” since the campaign began. 
Chesapeake Utilities Corporation (NYSE: CPK) is a Dover, Delaware utility holding company that most folks in our patch have never heard of — which is a shame, because CPK owns two systems that Marcellus and Utica molecules flow through every single day. The company posted second quarter results Aug. 6 and held its analyst call Aug. 7. Buried inside the slides are updates on an Ohio data center pipeline, a nearly finished LNG plant on the Delmarva Peninsula, and a fresh $100 million bump to this year’s capital budget. Here’s CPK’s M-U story. 
When a pipeline construction contractor tells you its gas transmission work has more than doubled in a single year, that’s not a stock story — that’s a leading indicator. Energy Services of America (Nasdaq: ESOA), the Huntington, WV-based contractor that actually digs the ditches and welds the pipe across Appalachia, reported fiscal third quarter results Monday afternoon. Revenue hit $130.0 million, up 25.5% from $103.6 million a year ago. But the number that matters for our readers is buried in the fine print of the 10-Q: revenue from Gas & Petroleum Transmission work jumped from roughly $9.7 million to $21.2 million — an increase of about 120%.