NY Banned Fracking, Now Data Centers. Is PA Dumb Enough to Copy?
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. Read More “NY Banned Fracking, Now Data Centers. Is PA Dumb Enough to Copy?”
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. 
OTHER U.S. REGIONS: Conservative group’s ‘right to natural gas’ initiative makes Colorado’s 2026 ballot; NJ data center makes case for on-site power generation during 6-hour hearing; NATIONAL: August heat helps lift U.S. natural gas futures; USA oil, gas workforce hits lowest level in years; Billionaires, misleading campaigns are at the heart of the climate-industrial complex; INTERNATIONAL: Crude steady as Iran risks persist; Indonesia and India are jointly planning a hydrocarbon-powered future; China’s great wall of fossil fuels. 
Infinity Natural Resources (INR), the Morgantown, WV-based pureplay Marcellus/Utica driller, dropped its second quarter 2026 numbers on Monday and walked analysts through them Tuesday morning. The short version: production jumped 75% year over year to 348.5 million cubic feet equivalent per day (MMcfe/d), adjusted EBITDAX hit a company-record $114.7 million, the first wells from the Ohio Utica package INR bought from Antero came online ahead of plan — and INR quietly drilled and cored its first deep dry gas Utica well in Pennsylvania. Full-year guidance was reaffirmed. Not a bad quarter for a company that was still private 18 months ago. 
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? 
If you’ve been to an energy conference in the last year, you’ve heard someone say EQT is forecasting 100 Bcf/d of new natural gas demand by 2030. It happened at 
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. 
Northern Oil & Gas (NOG) is a Minnesota company most people file under “Bakken,” so its quarterly report doesn’t usually land on our radar. It should have. NOG is the largest publicly traded non-operator in the country — it buys minority working interests and lets somebody else run the rig — and after last week’s second quarter release, Appalachia is its biggest gas engine. Marcellus-Utica volumes set another company record, and CEO Nick O’Grady said NOG has quietly spent north of $100 million buying Utica drilling locations in the past year, with lease bonuses up “50-plus percent” since the campaign began. 
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.