TVA Fires Up 1,450 MW Cumberland Plant, Locks In Nearly 1 Tcf of Gas
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. Read More “TVA Fires Up 1,450 MW Cumberland Plant, Locks In Nearly 1 Tcf of Gas”
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. 
PJM Interconnection announced yesterday (Aug. 3) that 715 new power projects totaling more than 200 gigawatts (GW) made it into Cycle 1 of its overhauled interconnection process — the line that generators must stand in before they’re allowed to plug into the grid. The headline number is impressive. The breakdown is more impressive, at least if you own mineral rights in Greene County or run a rig in Belmont County. 
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. 
TC Energy issued its second quarter 2026 update on July 30, and the headline numbers were strong: comparable EBITDA of C$2.9 billion, up 12% over 2Q25, and full-year guidance now tracking the upper end of the C$11.6–$11.8 billion range. Nice, but that’s investor stuff. The news that matters for Marcellus/Utica landowners, drillers, and midstreamers is sitting in the project tables — and in a demand forecast TC has now raised two years running. 
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. 
Every so often the antis tell you exactly what they’re up to, and you just have to sit back and enjoy it. On Saturday, Inside Climate News ran a story on the ongoing campaign by the Environmental Integrity Project (EIP), Clean Air Council, and their friends to jack up setbacks — the required distance between a well pad and the nearest building — from the current 500 feet to distances that would end new shale drilling in Pennsylvania. The new twist? They’ve hitched the campaign to the data center boom. More data centers means more gas, and more gas means (in their telling) more danger, so hurry up and pass the rules. It’s the same petition MDN has been tracking since 2024, dressed in a 2026 outfit. 
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. 
Antero Midstream Corporation (AM) posted second quarter 2026 results on Tuesday and held its analyst call yesterday morning. A quick word on the corporate plumbing for newer readers: Antero Midstream and Antero Resources (AR) are two separate publicly traded companies that share a management team. AR drills the wells; AM gathers, compresses and moves the gas and handles the water. Different shareholders, same brain trust. The headline number is a good one. AM gathered 4.1 Bcf/d (billion cubic feet per day) during the quarter, a 19% jump year over year and a company record. Compression volumes rose 17%. Most of that growth came from the HG Midstream assets AM bought earlier this year and has now fully digested. Processing and fractionation capacity at AM’s joint venture ran at 100% utilization — you can’t do better than full. 
National Fuel Gas Company (NFG) — the Williamsville, NY company that drills (Seneca Resources), pipes (NFG Supply Corporation, Empire), and sells gas at the meter (NFG Distribution Corp) — issued its fiscal third quarter update Wednesday evening and talked it over with analysts Thursday morning. NFG’s fiscal year ends September 30, so their “third quarter” is everyone else’s second quarter (April–June). There’s a lot in here for Marcellus/Utica watchers, but two items stand out: Supply Corporation more than tripled the size of its Line N System Upgrade Project, and Seneca is about to start writing big checks to landowners in Tioga County. 
Detroit-based DT Midstream (DTM) reported second quarter 2026 results this week, and while the headline numbers were fine but unremarkable, the Appalachian news buried in the deck is worth your attention. DTM booked net income of $112 million ($1.09 per diluted share) and adjusted EBITDA of $305 million, declared a $0.88 per share dividend, and reaffirmed full-year 2026 adjusted EBITDA guidance of $1.155–$1.225 billion. Fine. Now here’s the part that matters if you own minerals in Belmont County or run a rig crew in Susquehanna County: DTM just signed up a new 380 MMcf/d interconnect on the NEXUS Gas Transmission pipeline that will feed a gas-fired power plant serving a new data center in Ohio — and it’s expanding its Appalachia Gathering System by 100 MMcf/d to shove more supply into NEXUS and Texas Eastern. 
I&S Inc. of New York, an Allegany-based well servicing company owned by Dan Sessler, is planning a $9 million expansion that will create at least 80 new jobs. The company, which has serviced oil, gas, and solution mining wells since 1988, is purchasing the old Allegany Drive-In property along Route 417 — just up the road from its current headquarters. Plans call for a new 5,000-square-foot office, a 14,400-square-foot commercial shop, and a 9,600-square-foot cold storage warehouse to store pipe for its oil, gas, and solution mining operations. The company secured a 10-year PILOT agreement from the Cattaraugus County IDA. Construction costs are estimated at $7.3 million. 
For the past two years we’ve heard the same complaint on repeat: those greedy data centers are jacking up your electric bill. State legislators have introduced data center construction bans. Towns have passed moratoriums. A Gallup poll found roughly 70% of Americans don’t want a data center anywhere near them. The White House even got seven big tech companies to sign a “Ratepayer Protection Pledge” this past March. Turns out the whole premise may be backward. A new working paper from researchers at the Electric Power Research Institute (EPRI) — Asa Watten, John Bistline, and Geoffrey Blanford — looked at the actual data from 2015 through 2024 and found data centers caused average residential electricity rates to fall. Not rise. Fall.