MDN Sleuths Out Location of New 200 MW PA Gas Data Center Project
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. Read More “MDN Sleuths Out Location of New 200 MW PA Gas Data Center Project”
Rochester, NY-based Energy Concepts has unveiled a modular natural gas power system called “Plato5X” that lets AI data centers generate their own electricity, make their own water, cool themselves, and capture 90% of their carbon emissions — without touching the local power grid or municipal water supply. Each 5-megawatt module runs on natural gas and is aimed squarely at the exploding AI/data center market, which is straining power grids and water systems across the country (
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. 
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. 
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. 
Let’s be honest — corporate “sustainability reports” are usually 100+ pages of stock photography, buzzwords, and pie charts about employee engagement. We normally give them a wide berth. But Williams released its 2025 Sustainability Report on July 29, and this one is different. Underneath the ESG wrapping paper is a straight-up growth story, and a surprising amount of it runs directly through the Marcellus and Utica. If you’re a landowner in Licking County, a driller in the Utica dry gas window, or anyone who owns WMB shares, there’s real news here. 
DTE Energy reported second quarter 2026 results yesterday, and before we dig in, one piece of housekeeping. DTE used to be an M-U player in a big way — it owned gathering systems in the Marcellus and Utica plus half of the NEXUS pipeline. That business walked out the door on July 1, 2021, when DTE spun it off as DT Midstream (see 
Back in March, we told you about two radical green groups — the Southern Environmental Law Center and the Sierra Club — running to court to block new gas-fired turbines at Georgia Power’s Plant Bowen in Bartow County, Georgia (see