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. Read More “Virginia Fines Williams $179K Over Erosion Controls on Transco SSE”
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. Read More “Big Green Coming for Williams’ Ohio Gas-Fired Power Plants”
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. Read More “M-U Rigs Flat @ 35 as Haynesville Rigs Roar to 59; Nat’l Count Up 5”
Back in March, we brought you news that the Trump administration had announced “South Mon,” a $17 billion, 4.3-gigawatt (GW) natural gas-fired power hub headed for southwestern Pennsylvania, funded as part of Japan’s $550 billion U.S. investment commitment (see Trump Admin Announces $17 Billion Gas-Fired Power Plant for SWPA). At the time, we grumbled that there were “precious few details” — no location, no contracts, no money changing hands. Just a handshake at the White House. On Tuesday, NextEra Energy (NYSE: NEE) announced the handshake has become a signature. The company has executed definitive agreements with the U.S. Department of Commerce and the Government of Japan covering up to 10 GW of gas-fired generation across Pennsylvania and Texas — and, more importantly, an initial $3.3 billion tranche of funding has been released. That money buys turbines. Real ones. Read More “NextEra Inks Final Deal, Gets $3.3B for 4.3-GW SWPA Gas Plant”
WhiteHawk Minerals (NYSE: WHK), the Philadelphia company that has quietly become one of the largest mineral and royalty owners in the Marcellus, filed its first full quarterly report as a public company this week: $111.8 million of new acquisitions, record production of 70.0 MMcfe/d, and its first real dividend at $2.00 per share annualized. But the most interesting thing WhiteHawk said all week wasn’t in the press release. It came out of CEO Daniel Herz’s mouth on Thursday’s earnings call — some of the biggest drillers in Appalachia are now partnering with WhiteHawk to buy minerals ahead of the drill bit. Read More “Drillers Partner with WhiteHawk to Buy M-U Minerals Early”
A new report from RBN Energy fills in a piece of the Project Beacon puzzle we haven’t fully covered: two separate Millennium Pipeline expansions — one already sanctioned, one still on the drawing board — that DT Midstream and TC Energy are advancing to feed New England’s growing appetite for Marcellus/Utica gas. One is moving fast. The other needs New York State’s blessing, which is never a sure thing. Read More “Millennium’s Two New Expansions Set Up Enbridge’s Project Beacon”
Forward natural gas prices for this coming winter at the Cove Point LNG terminal in Maryland have gone parabolic — and if you produce, gather, or transport Marcellus/Utica gas, you should care, because the pipes behind this story are the same pipes you use every day. A quick primer: a ‘forward price’ is what buyers and sellers agree today to pay for gas delivered on a future date — think of it as locking in a price months ahead of time. When forward prices spike, it means the market is already betting on tight supply or high demand down the road. Read More “Cove Point’s Winter Gas Premium Is Really an M-U Pipeline Story”
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. Read More “Akron’s B&W Buys 1 GW of Turbines for Gas-Fired Data Centers”
Smart Sand (NASDAQ: SND), the Yardley, Pennsylvania-based frac sand miner that trucks and trains Northern White sand into the Marcellus and Utica from mines a thousand miles away in Wisconsin and Illinois, just turned in what CEO Charles Young calls one of the best quarters in company history — and he put Appalachia at the top of the list of reasons why. Smart Sand sold roughly 1,864,000 tons of sand in the second quarter of 2026, a company record. That’s up 25% from the 1,492,000 tons sold in 1Q26 (itself a record at the time) and up 31% from 1,424,000 tons in 2Q25. Read More “Smart Sand Sets Records in 2Q26, Credits Appalachian Demand”
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? Read More “Devon, Williams Top PA Intern List; Who Inherits That Bench?”
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. Read More “FERC Green-Lights $5.2B Kinder Morgan Southeast Gas Push”
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. Read More “M-U Rig Count Loses 1, Cumulative @ 35; Nat’l Even @ 588”
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. Read More “MPLX Marcellus Proc. Plants 96% Full, Harmon Creek III Starts Up”
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. Read More “ET Reports Record Marcus Hook Exports, NE Gathering Volumes Up”
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. Read More “Duke’s Carolinas Gas Fleet Grows; Transco, Southgate Will Feed It”