Venture Global 2Q26: Record $2.5B EBITDA, 127 LNG Cargoes Shipped
Venture Global (VG), the Arlington, Virginia-based LNG exporter that operates the Calcasieu Pass and Plaquemines liquefaction plants in Louisiana — and is building a third, CP2 — reported second quarter 2026 results Tuesday that were, by any measure, a blowout. Revenue hit $4.6 billion (up 48% from 2Q25), net income came in at $1.3 billion (up 266%), and consolidated adjusted EBITDA reached $2.5 billion (up 79%), the largest quarterly EBITDA in company history. VG shipped 127 cargoes in the quarter and raised its full-year EBITDA guidance to $8.7-$9.1 billion, up from the $8.2-$8.5 billion it guided to in May. The company also passed its 1,000th cargo overall and jacked up its quarterly dividend by 122%. Why do we care in Appalachia? Because Plaquemines is fed by pipelines that carry Marcellus/Utica molecules south — and VG is planning to nearly double in size. Read More “Venture Global 2Q26: Record $2.5B EBITDA, 127 LNG Cargoes Shipped”
The U.S. Energy Information Administration (EIA) released its August Short-Term Energy Outlook (STEO) on Tuesday — the agency’s monthly toss at the energy dartboard. Last month EIA nudged its Henry Hub natural gas price forecast up a few pennies. This month it took a real bite out of it. EIA now expects Henry Hub to average $3.44/MMBtu in 2026 (down from $3.67 last month) and $3.31/MMBtu in 2027 (down from $3.49). For the current quarter, the number is $2.87/MMBtu — a full 50 cents below what the agency predicted a month ago. The short version for landowners and royalty owners: gas is going to be cheap this fall. The longer version is more interesting, and it’s a story about where the gas is coming from. 
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. 
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. 
A unanimous Ohio Supreme Court has ordered the tiny Pickaway County village of Ashville to let voters decide the fate of a data center and natural gas power plant — a project the village council tried to fast-track by declaring it an “emergency” not subject to a public vote. The court didn’t buy it. But before opponents celebrate too hard, the ruling doesn’t guarantee a vote will actually happen this November — county election officials still get to decide whether the deal is even the kind of thing voters can weigh in on at all. 
PJM Interconnection and Dominion Energy are reviewing a July 22 event in Northern Virginia in which roughly 3,800 megawatts (MW) of data center load — the largest such disconnection in PJM’s history — unexpectedly ripped itself off the grid after a routine, correctly cleared transmission fault, forcing PJM operators to scramble to keep the grid stable. The event has reignited a fight over whether data centers, which are growing explosively across the PJM footprint (including Marcellus/Utica territory), need to be held to new “ride through” standards so they stop treating minor grid hiccups like five-alarm fires. 
Pennsylvania got off easy in the 2026-27 budget. Only one data center bill made it into law, and it was a toothless one. But the Pittsburgh Business Times reports Harrisburg is loading up for another round this fall — and this time the antis have a working blueprint to copy. It’s called New York, where Gov. Kathy Hochul banned new hyperscale data centers last month, and where the anti-fracking crowd has already spent a decade proving what happens when a state tells industry to go away. 
Remember when Dan Rice IV (older brother of EQT CEO Toby Rice) sold his landfill-gas company Archaea Energy to BP for $4.1 billion back in 2022, pocketing the Rice family somewhere between $720 million and $975 million in the process? Well, what goes around comes around: BP told investors this week it’s now looking to sell Archaea. On the company’s Q2 2026 earnings call, new BP CEO Meg O’Neill said Archaea has turned out to be a “capital-intense” way to play the biogas market, and BP would rather go “capital-light” going forward. Translation: RNG isn’t the money-printer BP thought it would be four years ago, and Big Oil’s would-be savior molecule is getting shopped to the highest bidder. 
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. 
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. 
America’s biggest LNG exporter just had a monster quarter — and raised its full-year forecast for the second time this year. Cheniere Energy (NYSE: LNG) shipped 184 cargoes in the second quarter and is now building toward a platform that could eventually swallow more than 10 billion cubic feet of gas a day. Appalachian producers should be paying attention. Cheniere Energy reported second quarter 2026 results on Aug. 6, and the numbers were eye-popping. Revenues hit $5.73 billion, up 24% from a year ago. Consolidated adjusted EBITDA came in at $1.80 billion, up 27%. Net income was $3.07 billion, up 89% — though a big chunk of that is non-cash accounting noise we’ll get to in a minute. 
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? 
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. 
One of the biggest landowner-vs.-driller cases in Ohio shale history just ended — with no verdict, no dollar figure, and a two-page piece of paper. On July 29, a group of Belmont County mineral owners and Rice Drilling D LLC (owned by EQT) jointly asked a federal judge to throw out the case for good, roughly two months after it was supposed to go in front of a jury. Eight years, 580 docket entries, and one of the most consequential lease questions in the Utica — settled behind closed doors. 
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.