Duke’s Carolinas Gas Fleet Grows; Transco, Southgate Will Feed It
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”
New York’s Department of Environmental Conservation (DEC) and New York State Energy Research and Development Authority (NYSERDA) announced Wednesday they’ve formally adopted regulations tightening the Regional Greenhouse Gas Initiative (RGGI) — the multi-state carbon tax on coal- and gas-fired power plants — through 2037. The agencies used the words “affordable” or “affordability” six times in their joint announcement. Here’s what they didn’t mention: the price of an RGGI permit jumped 40% in one quarter this year, from $24.99 per ton in March to $35.00 in June. And New York households now pay the third-highest electricity prices in America, behind only Hawaii and California (according to federal data). Six mentions of affordability, zero mentions of the auction price. Funny how that works. 
EOG Resources has settled — and apparently bought out — the Noble County, Ohio landowner who beat it at the Sixth Circuit Court of Appeals last year in a fight over whether a driller can use one owner’s surface to drill horizontally into the neighbors’ minerals. The case, EOG Resources, Inc. v. Lucky Land Management, LLC, produced a published appellate ruling that’s now a go-to precedent on surface rights for horizontal (lateral) drilling anywhere severed mineral estates exist — which describes most of the Marcellus/Utica. MDN first flagged this case a year ago when we caught the 6th Circuit’s reversal (see below) but couldn’t pin down the county or the full backstory (see 
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 
Amazon Web Services (AWS) is now in talks to build a data center campus next to the Homer City Energy Campus in Indiana County, PA — meaning the company that already pledged $20 billion for data centers in eastern PA (see our prior coverage 
Quinnipiac University released a new poll of Pennsylvania registered voters on July 15, and one question in it should worry everyone who makes a living from Marcellus gas. Asked whether they would support or oppose building an AI data center in their community, 74% of Pennsylvania voters said “oppose,” 16% said “support,” and 10% offered no opinion. That’s a jump from Quinnipiac’s February 25 poll, when the split was 68% opposed and 20% in favor. The opposition is bipartisan — 64% of Republicans, 82% of Democrats, and 77% of independents all said no thanks. Three-quarters of voters (76%) say they’re following data center news either very closely (26%) or somewhat closely (50%). And Gov. Josh Shapiro isn’t getting credit either: just 24% approve of how he’s handling data centers in Pennsylvania, while 34% disapprove and a whopping 42% have no opinion. The survey polled 895 registered voters July 9-13, with a margin of error of +/- 4.3 percentage points. 
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 
Back in January 2022, we brought you what looked like a milestone: the WV Dept. of Environmental Protection had issued a construction permit for a big Marcellus gas-fired power plant next door to the Longview coal plant in Maidsville, Monongalia County (see 
The Tennessee Valley Authority (TVA) posted its third-quarter fiscal 2026 results yesterday (Aug. 4) — a press release, an investor presentation, and a 10-Q filed with the Securities and Exchange Commission. The headline numbers are fine but boring: $10 billion in revenue over nine months, net income of $965 million, up $220 million from last year. Yawn. However, if you dig into the 10-Q, there’s real news for Marcellus/Utica producers. TVA’s giant new Cumberland gas plant has fired up for the first time. TVA borrowed $2 billion to pay for it — the largest such financing in the agency’s history. And TVA has quietly expanded its natural gas hedge book to nearly 1 trillion cubic feet. Let’s dig in. 
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. 
Want to know what the smartest money in the natural gas business expects to happen in the Northeast this winter? Don’t ask a politician. Look at the forward curve. As of the first of August, traders were pricing December-through-February gas at Algonquin Citygate (the Boston benchmark), Iroquois Zone 2 in New York, and three Tennessee Gas Zone 6 points in New England above $18 per MMBtu. At the other 77 pricing hubs Natural Gas Intelligence tracks across the U.S. and Canada, that same three-month strip averages under $5. Read that again. Same country. Same historically abundant supply. Roughly four times the price. 
The Intercontinental Exchange (ICE) — the outfit that owns the New York Stock Exchange and runs the world’s largest energy derivatives markets — put out a press release in mid-July containing a number that ought to catch the eye of every Marcellus/Utica producer and royalty owner. On July 1, open interest in ICE’s North American financial natural gas futures and options markets hit an all-time record of 13.4 million contracts, up 9% from a year ago. “Open interest” is just a fancy way of counting the bets still sitting on the table — contracts that have been opened and not yet closed out or settled. A record means more people than ever are using these markets to lock in a price ahead of time. Which raises the obvious question: lock in a price against what? 
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.