CPK Update: Utica Gas to Data Centers, Marcellus Gas to Delmarva
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. Read More “CPK Update: Utica Gas to Data Centers, Marcellus Gas to Delmarva”
Last week, the Pennsylvania Marcellus lost one rig, now down to 16 active rigs after running 17 rigs for 12 weeks in a row. Bummer. Ohio lost a rig two weeks ago and didn’t pick it back up last week, remaining at 10 active rigs for the second week. And West Virginia picked up Ohio’s lost rig two weeks ago, boosting its number to 9 active rigs, maintaining that number last week. All told, the M-U operated 35 rigs last week, which is 21 fewer than our biggest rival (for money and attention), the Haynesville, which operated 56 rigs last week. 
MPLX LP — the Findlay, Ohio midstream giant that bought MarkWest back in 2015 and, in doing so, became the biggest gas processor in the Marcellus/Utica — posted second quarter 2026 results on Aug. 4. Buried in the usual pile of EBITDA-speak is a set of numbers M-U landowners and drillers should care about: MPLX’s Marcellus processing plants ran at 96% of capacity, its Utica gathering systems moved 18% more gas than a year ago, and a brand-new 300 MMcf/d processing plant is starting up in southwest Pennsylvania this month. Full disclosure up front: MPLX is not building all this steel because it likes the scenery. It’s building it because Appalachian producers are drilling again. 
Energy Transfer (ET), the Dallas-based pipeline behemoth that owns the Mariner East pipeline system, the Marcus Hook NGL terminal near Philadelphia, and a 32.6% stake in the Rover Pipeline, issued its second quarter 2026 update on Tuesday — and it was a monster. Adjusted EBITDA hit $5.07 billion, up 31% from 2Q25’s $3.87 billion. Distributable cash flow attributable to partners came in at $2.59 billion, up 32%. Net income attributable to partners more than doubled, hitting $2.09 billion versus $1.16 billion a year ago. ET raised its full-year 2026 EBITDA guidance to $18.8–$19.1 billion, up half a billion dollars at the midpoint from what the company told investors just three months ago. ET is a sprawling company with assets in 44 states, so let’s do what we always do — strip out the Permian noise and get to what matters for the Marcellus/Utica. 
Duke Energy reported second quarter 2026 results Tuesday, and while the earnings themselves are fine-but-boring utility fare, buried in the slide deck is one of the better demand stories going for Marcellus/Utica producers: Duke now has 6,025 megawatts (MW) of new gas-fired generation sited in North and South Carolina, every announced plant has its gas supply under contract, and the two pipelines that will carry most of those molecules south both trace back to Appalachia. 
Two months ago, we told you PA Attorney General Dave Sunday had charged Eureka Resources with seven crimes over years of leaking tanks at its Standing Stone plant in Bradford County (see 
Williams dropped its second quarter 2026 results after the close on Monday, August 3, and held the analyst call Tuesday morning. The headline numbers are good: adjusted EBITDA of $1.921 billion (up 6%), GAAP net income of $827 million (up 51%), and a raised full-year guidance midpoint of $8.4 billion. Wall Street liked it. But the story for MDN readers isn’t in the headline. It’s buried in the volume tables on page 8 of the release, in a capital spending line nobody read out loud, and in two new Transco projects in Pennsylvania and New Jersey that got about eleven seconds of airtime on the call. 
The long, sad saga of Eureka Resources has a new chapter — and for once, it’s not another fine or another leak. Eureka has sold the business operations at all three of its shuttered Pennsylvania frack wastewater treatment plants. Two of the three went to Select Water Solutions, one of the biggest water-management companies in the oilfield. The third went to a Washington County trucking outfit. We didn’t hear this from Eureka. We heard it from the Middle Susquehanna Riverkeeper Association, which pried the details out of the PA Department of Environmental Protection (DEP) in advance of the one-year anniversary of the Aug. 17, 2025 spill that dumped 16,000 gallons of untreated wastewater into the West Branch of the Susquehanna River (see 
On July 30, French environmental services giant Veolia announced it had been picked by “a major project developer” to operate and maintain a 350-megawatt (MW) microgrid that will power an artificial intelligence data center campus in Ohio. The press release carried a New Albany, Ohio dateline. It’s a genuinely big deal — a behind-the-meter power plant that will supply 100% of a data center campus without leaning on the grid at all. Here’s the dots nobody else has connected. This is the same Veolia that Antero Resources and Antero Midstream spent six years suing over a botched frack wastewater plant in West Virginia. And Veolia announced this shiny new Ohio contract exactly six days after wiring Antero a check for $371 million. You can’t make this stuff up. 
Two federal lawsuits landed in the same Washington, D.C. courthouse six days apart last month, and while both are nominally about pipelines in Mississippi and Alabama, Marcellus and Utica readers should pay close attention. Not because of where the pipe goes — but because of which pipelines the greens dragged into their complaints as Exhibit A. 
Enbridge reported second quarter results on Friday, July 31, and buried in a Canadian midstream giant’s quarterly slide deck — a document that is 90% oil sands, Permian, and balance sheet talk — is the best piece of news Appalachian producers have gotten out of New England in fifteen years. Project Beacon, Enbridge’s proposed expansion of the Algonquin Gas Transmission (AGT) system into New England, ran a binding open season from May 18 to July 1. An open season is simply a pipeline asking shippers to raise their hands and commit, in writing, to buy capacity. CEO Greg Ebel told analysts the response “significantly exceeded our initial expectations.” Matthew Akman, who runs Enbridge’s gas transmission business, said Beacon would be “multiple times” the size of the AGT Enhancement project already underway, and that a big enough Beacon could save New England utility customers more than $1 billion a year. 
TC Energy issued its second quarter 2026 update on July 30, and the headline numbers were strong: comparable EBITDA of C$2.9 billion, up 12% over 2Q25, and full-year guidance now tracking the upper end of the C$11.6–$11.8 billion range. Nice, but that’s investor stuff. The news that matters for Marcellus/Utica landowners, drillers, and midstreamers is sitting in the project tables — and in a demand forecast TC has now raised two years running. 
Dominion Energy reported second-quarter 2026 results on July 31, and while Wall Street focused on the penny-counting, there were three items in the release and on the analyst call that matter to Marcellus/Utica producers, midstreamers, and landowners: two new gas-fired power plants moving into permitting, a merger timeline that’s now locked in at the state level, and a nine-figure write-off on renewable assets that tells you which way the wind is actually blowing. 
Antero Midstream Corporation (AM) posted second quarter 2026 results on Tuesday and held its analyst call yesterday morning. A quick word on the corporate plumbing for newer readers: Antero Midstream and Antero Resources (AR) are two separate publicly traded companies that share a management team. AR drills the wells; AM gathers, compresses and moves the gas and handles the water. Different shareholders, same brain trust. The headline number is a good one. AM gathered 4.1 Bcf/d (billion cubic feet per day) during the quarter, a 19% jump year over year and a company record. Compression volumes rose 17%. Most of that growth came from the HG Midstream assets AM bought earlier this year and has now fully digested. Processing and fractionation capacity at AM’s joint venture ran at 100% utilization — you can’t do better than full.