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Pipeline Owners Beware: EQT May Let Range’s Pipe Contracts Expire
When EQT announced on Oct. 26 that it would buy Range Resources (see EQT Swallows Range Resources in $50B Merger: Biggest M-U News Ever!), most of the talk was about size. The combined company will be the biggest gas producer in the country, eclipsing current #1 Expand Energy. A new analysis from East Daley Analytics looks at a different question: what happens to the pipeline companies that move Range’s gas and liquids? East Daley’s answer: much of the money EQT hopes to save will come from letting Range’s pipeline contracts expire. That’s bad news for some big pipeline owners, starting in 2028. And EQT management hinted at the same thing on deal day. Read More “Pipeline Owners Beware: EQT May Let Range’s Pipe Contracts Expire”
Last week we told you storm clouds were gathering over the Marcellus now that Democrats control all three levers of state government in Harrisburg (see 
Back in May, we told you that FTAI Infrastructure agreed to sell Long Ridge Energy & Power, the 505-megawatt (MW) natural gas-fired power plant and 1,600-acre former Ormet aluminum smelter site in Hannibal (Monroe County), Ohio, to bitcoin miner-turned-AI data center developer MARA Holdings for $1.52 billion (see 
TC Energy, the Canadian pipeline giant that owns Columbia Gas Transmission (the No. 1 pipeline operator in Appalachia, by its own count), released its third-quarter 2026 results last Thursday. The big news for our region: TC approved a US$1.8 billion expansion of its Crossroads pipeline, designed in part to carry Marcellus/Utica gas west to the Midwest. CEO François Poirier said Crossroads and the Appalachia Supply Project (approved in April) amount to “two major arteries of egress out of the Appalachian Basin.” TC also told analysts it expects Appalachian gas production to grow by another 10 Bcf/d (billion cubic feet per day) by 2035. Music to our ears! 
EOG Resources, the Houston-based giant that bought Encino Energy’s Ohio Utica empire in August 2025 for $5.6 billion, issued its third-quarter update last week. Company-wide, it was a record quarter for oil, NGL, and natural gas production. For the Utica, the headline is speed and cost: EOG says it’s drilling faster, fracking faster, and spending 20% less per foot than Encino did. The company will also open its own in-basin Ohio sand mine before the end of this year, saving more than $300,000 per well. And yes, EOG is talking to data centers about Utica gas. 
Four years after Shell’s Beaver County ethane cracker started up, it’s about to get a permanent air permit. In Saturday’s Pennsylvania Bulletin, DEP announced it intends to issue the plant’s first Title V operating permit. Until now, the $14 billion complex has run on a string of temporary permits that DEP kept extending. The public can comment until January 19, with a meeting on December 17 and a hearing on January 7. Expect the usual suspects to show up. Expect plenty of union hard hats too. 
Enbridge, the Canadian pipeline giant that owns Texas Eastern (TETCO), Algonquin Gas Transmission, half of the NEXUS Pipeline, and Ohio’s biggest gas utility, issued its third-quarter 2026 update on Friday. For the Marcellus/Utica, the big news is Project Beacon, the ~300 MMcf/d (million cubic feet per day) Algonquin expansion into New England. Enbridge says it expects to finalize customer contracts early in the new year. There’s also a rate deal for Enbridge Gas Ohio, a new TVA pipeline that ties into TETCO, and some diplomatic words about Ohio’s new governor from Enbridge’s incoming CEO. 
Time for another check of what our Marcellus/Utica (M-U) molecules are selling for, and the news is about what you’d expect after weeks of mild fall weather: not much. On Wednesday, the Henry Hub spot price (the national benchmark in Louisiana) averaged $2.610 per MMBtu (million British thermal units, roughly 1,000 cubic feet of gas). Here in the Northeast, gas for Thursday delivery sold for about a dollar. Mid-Atlantic gas (Texas Eastern M-3) went for $1.06, New York City (Transco Zone 6 NY) for $1.03, and New England (Algonquin Citygate) for $1.31. On Thursday, Texas Eastern M-2, the main pricing point for gas produced in southwestern PA, West Virginia, and Ohio, ticked up 5 cents to $1.100. That’s still less than half the Henry Hub price. A new NGI analysis explains why: heating demand in the East is running way behind last year, so the region has more gas than it needs. Even Canada has quit sending us much gas. 
Enverus Intelligence Research (EIR) just released its quarterly scorecard on oil and gas mergers and acquisitions (M&A), and the Marcellus/Utica is all over it. U.S. upstream deals (buying and selling wells, acreage, and whole drilling companies) totaled $12.6 billion in the third quarter, and October added another $18 billion, led by EQT’s $13.8 billion takeover of Range Resources. That pushes 2026’s total to $80.5 billion, and the year still has two months to go. That’s already more than all of 2025. The part that should get our readers’ attention is Enverus’s prediction that the Utica is the most likely place for the next big gas merger. 
PJM Interconnection, which runs the power grid for 67 million people in 13 states (including PA, OH and WV) and D.C., issued its winter outlook yesterday. The short version: the lights should stay on this winter, even though PJM expects demand to set a new winter record. But a slide deck PJM presented to its Operating Committee the same day shows how thin the cushion gets if the wind stops blowing and a big gas supply problem hits at the same time. And it shows, once again, which fuel carries the load: natural gas. 
Yesterday we told you how small-town Ohio voters clobbered data centers at the ballot box (see 
Two weeks ago, MDN told you Kinder Morgan had made a final investment decision (FID) to build the Southeast Connector, a 2.6 Bcf/d (billion cubic feet per day) pipeline designed to carry Marcellus/Utica gas into the Southeast (see 
How much of Pennsylvania is a so-called “environmental justice” (EJ) area? We get that question from readers, and frankly, we’ve never had a solid answer. In 2023, then-DEP Secretary Rich Negrin said he thought “75% of Pennsylvania” would end up as EJ communities, and MDN repeated that number. So we went to DEP’s own mapping tool, 
An MDN subscriber who receives Marcellus royalties wrote to us (quite a while ago) to warn other landowners. Pennsylvania’s Department of Revenue (DOR) keeps sending him state income tax bills for amounts his driller already withheld from his royalty checks and sent to Harrisburg. Not once. Not twice. FOUR times, by his count. Each time, his accountants had to step in and get the bill thrown out. His advice to fellow royalty owners: don’t pay a DOR tax bill until you’ve confirmed the tax wasn’t already withheld and paid. We dug into how this can happen and why landowners living outside Pennsylvania are most likely to get these letters. Here’s what we found, and what to do if one lands in your mailbox.