Natural gas has always been the overlooked little brother to crude oil that drives the fossil fuel industry dating back to the famed Drake Well in 1859 in Pennsylvania, which launched the U.S. oil and gas industry.
The dynamics have changed now—especially in the heart of the gassy Marcellus Shale in Pennsylvania. Gas demand is beginning to boom thanks to the electricity feeding frenzy from data centers, skyrocketing liquefied natural gas (LNG) exports, and the ongoing retirements of aging coal plants being replaced by relatively cleaner-burning gas.
Many of the nation’s top gas producers, including Expand Energy, EQT, Range Resources, and Antero Resources, all have major Appalachian footprints and market cap values that have spiked by 25% to 75% the past 12 months.
“With the resource-rich potential in this [Marcellus] basin and the growing demand component for AI and data centers and power, it really is setting us up well to help shape this AI revolution that’s going to take place here in the United States,” Range Resources CEO and President Dennis Degner told Fortune.
A decade ago, the gas industry’s fortunes focused on seasonality and how cold each winter would prove, Degner said. “Now we’re talking about power and data centers and LNG essentially doubling over the next few years. Those are all big, diverse demand components that really get us excited about the durability of our business model.”
The Appalachian region—primarily the Marcellus and Utica shale plays in Pennsylvania, West Virginia, and Ohio—produces just over one-third of the nation’s gas—and very little oil—with proximity to Virginia’s growing Data Center Alley and, now, more AI infrastructure expected within Appalachia.
After a couple of decades during which U.S. power demand remained relatively stagnant, domestic electricity consumption is expected to surge by 25% from 2023 to 2035 and roughly 60% from 2023 to 2050, driven largely by AI and data centers, according to the International Energy Agency.
Likewise, record-high LNG exports will roughly double by 2030. Based on new construction underway or greenlit along the U.S. Gulf Coast, LNG exports are expected to rise from 15 billion cubic feet per day in 2024 to at least 30 billion daily by the end of 2030.
“It’s really night and day when you look at the gas names versus the oil names,” said Gabriele Sorbara, energy analyst at Siebert Williams Shank & Co. “The fundamentals for gas are very strong. You’re going to have massive tailwinds.”
Appalachia’s tech boom
Antero chairman and CEO Paul Rady said in his earnings statement that the industry now expects natural gas demand to soar 25% by 2030, led by LNG growth and then by data center power thirst.
That’s an astonishing jump for a U.S. sector that pumps out 107 billion cubic feet of gas per day—already double the amount since the nation’s shale gas boom kicked off 20 years ago.
The top gas producers are all exceeding their production estimates this year with goals to continue ramping up for at least the next two or three years. But they’re doing it without huge spending hikes because of the operational efficiencies gained through drilling and completing wells.
Range Resources, for instance, aims to grow its production 20% by the end of 2027. But Range is doing it while only operating two drilling rigs. For comparison, Big Oil giant and leading Permian Basin producer Exxon Mobilhas at least 35 rigs operating in the huge West Texas oil basin.
“These [Marcellus] wells are just massive,” Sorbara said.
Instead, the question marks focus on the exact extent of demand growth, the timing, and the gas pricing, making gas players relatively conservative when it comes to ramping up production, building new pipelines, and inking fixed-pricing deals with data center developers.
For instance, since mid-June, natural gas prices and stock values have slumped a bit because of milder weather and rising gas storage levels. But that’s not slowing the bullishness.
Range sends about half of its Pennsylvania gas toward the U.S. Gulf Coast and LNG exports but, because of pipeline constraints, additional growth is almost all coming from regional data center demand.
In July, Trump touted $92 billion in energy and AI investments in Pennsylvania from hyperscalers, power generators and more. Range, for instance, has a new partnership with Imperial Land industrial park developer in Pennsylvania to fuel new gas-fired power generation for data centers.
Pennsylvania’s Homer City complex will soon become the nation’s largest gas-fired power plant. The massive 1.9 coal plant east of Pittsburgh is being converted to natural gas with up to 4.5 gigawatts of power capacity to serve a sprawling data center campus.
The largest Marcellus gas producer, EQT, recently inked deals to provide gas to Homer City and to Pennsylvania’s planned Shippingport Power Station, also being converted from coal. And EQT is providing pipelines services to fuel planned gas plants in West Virginia in the heart of coal country.
“The cluster effect of these AI data centers and these ecosystems will only continue to build on themselves,” EQT CEO Toby Rice said in his earnings call. “As momentum grows in our operational footprint, we think the opportunity could get larger.
“One of the reasons why people are selecting this region to build their data centers is because they’re building on top of a lot of gas infrastructure,” he added.
There may be a current bottleneck on gas turbines for building power plants, but manufacturing is ramping up and most of the hyperscalers’ projects are a few years from coming online.
The nation’s top natural gas producer is little-known Expand Energy because it was formed just 10 months ago through the combination of Chesapeake Energy and Southwestern Energy. Expand has huge presences in both Appalachia and northern Louisiana’s gassy Haynesville Shale near the LNG hubs.
“It’s a pretty exciting time for natural gas,” said Expand CEO Nick Dell’Osso in the second-quarter earnings call. “You have people recognizing the value that gas plays in the economy, the efficiency that gas creates for the growth in power demand, which is all tied to our growing economy fueled by the innovation associated with AI.”
The gas players are increasingly confident they’re not going to boom and bust. The Marcellus has ample reserves for decades so long as they don’t overproduce.
“We can do this for decades to come, and now you’re talking about a [data center] demand component that’s coming that’s heavily dependent on reliability, repeatability, and the [gas] inventory,” Range’s Degner told Fortune. Of course, Range thrives on all three, he emphasized.
SpaceX is preparing to sell insider shares in a transaction that would value Elon Musk’s rocket and satellite maker at as much as $800 billion, people familiar with the matter said, reclaiming the title of the world’s most valuable private company.
The details, discussed by SpaceX’s board of directors on Thursday at its Starbase hub in Texas, could change based on interest from insider sellers and buyers or other factors, said some of the people, who asked not to be identified as the information isn’t public. SpaceX is also exploring a possible initial public offering as soon as late next year, one of the people said.
Another person briefed on the matter said that the price under discussion for the sale of some employees and investors’ shares is higher than $400 apiece, which would value SpaceX at between $750 billion and $800 billion. The company wouldn’t raise any funds though this planned sale, though a successful offering at such levels would catapult it past the record of $500 billion valuation achieved by OpenAI in October.
Elon Musk on Saturday denied that SpaceX is raising money at a $800 billion valuation without addressing Bloomberg’s reporting on the planned offering of insiders’ shares.
“SpaceX has been cash flow positive for many years and does periodic stock buybacks twice a year to provide liquidity for employees and investors,” Musk said in a post on his social media platform X.
The share sale price under discussion would be a substantial increase from the $212 a share set in July, when the company raised money and sold shares at a valuation of $400 billion. The Wall Street Journal and Financial Times earlier reported the $800 billion valuation target.
News of SpaceX’s valuation sent shares of EchoStar Corp., a satellite TV and wireless company, up as much as 18%. Last month, EchoStar had agreed to sell spectrum licenses to SpaceX for $2.6 billion, adding to an earlier agreement to sell about $17 billion in wireless spectrum to Musk’s company.
The world’s most prolific rocket launcher, SpaceX dominates the space industry with its Falcon 9 rocket that lifts satellites and people to orbit.
SpaceX is also the industry leader in providing internet services from low-Earth orbit through Starlink, a system of more than 9,000 satellites that is far ahead of competitors including Amazon.com Inc.’s Amazon Leo.
Elite Group
SpaceX is among an elite group of companies that have the ability to raise funds at $100 billion-plus valuations while delaying or denying they have any plan to go public.
An IPO of the company at an $800 billion value would vault SpaceX into another rarefied group — the 20 largest public companies, a few notches below Musk’s Tesla Inc.
If SpaceX sold 5% of the company at that valuation, it would have to sell $40 billion of stock — making it the biggest IPO of all time, well above Saudi Aramco’s $29 billion listing in 2019. The firm sold just 1.5% of the company in that offering, a much smaller slice than the majority of publicly traded firms make available.
A listing would also subject SpaceX to the volatility of being a public company, versus private firms whose valuations are closely guarded secrets. Space and defense company IPOs have had a mixed reception in 2025. Karman Holdings Inc.’s stock has nearly tripled since its debut, while Firefly Aerospace Inc. and Voyager Technologies Inc. have plunged by double-digit percentages since their debuts.
SpaceX executives have repeatedly floated the idea of spinning off SpaceX’s Starlink business into a separate, publicly traded company — a concept President Gwynne Shotwell first suggested in 2020.
However, Musk cast doubt on the prospect publicly over the years and Chief Financial Officer Bret Johnsen said in 2024 that a Starlink IPO would be something that would take place more likely “in the years to come.”
The Information, citing people familiar with the discussions, separately reported on Friday that SpaceX has told investors and financial institution representatives that it’s aiming for an IPO of the entire company in the second half of next year.
A so-called tender or secondary offering, through which employees and some early shareholders can sell shares, provides investors in closely held companies such as SpaceX a way to generate liquidity.
SpaceX is working to develop its new Starship vehicle, advertised as the most powerful rocket ever developed to loft huge numbers of Starlink satellites as well as carry cargo and people to moon and, eventually, Mars.
The National Park Service will offer free admission to U.S. residents on President Donald Trump’s birthday next year — which also happens to be Flag Day — but is eliminating the benefit for Martin Luther King Jr. Day and Juneteenth.
The new list of free admission days for Americans is the latest example of the Trump administration downplaying America’s civil rights history while also promoting the president’s image, name and legacy.
Last year, the list of free days included Martin Luther King Jr Day and Juneteenth — which is June 19 — but not June 14, Trump’s birthday.
The new free-admission policy takes effect Jan. 1 and was one of several changes announced by the Park Service late last month, including higher admission fees for international visitors.
The other days of free park admission in 2026 are Presidents Day, Memorial Day, Independence Day, Constitution Day, Veterans Day, President Theodore Roosevelt’s birthday (Oct. 27) and the anniversary of the creation of the Park Service (Aug. 25).
Eliminating Martin Luther King Jr. Day and Juneteenth, which commemorates the day in 1865 when the last enslaved Americans were emancipated, removes two of the nation’s most prominent civil rights holidays.
Some civil rights leaders voiced opposition to the change after news about it began spreading over the weekend.
“The raw & rank racism here stinks to high heaven,” Harvard Kennedy School professor Cornell William Brooks, a former president of the NAACP, wrote on social media about the new policy.
Kristen Brengel, a spokesperson for the National Parks Conservation Association, said that while presidential administrations have tweaked the free days in the past, the elimination of Martin Luther King Jr. Day is particularly concerning. For one, the day has become a popular day of service for community groups that use the free day to perform volunteer projects at parks.
That will now be much more expensive, said Brengel, whose organization is a nonprofit that advocates for the park system.
“Not only does it recognize an American hero, it’s also a day when people go into parks to clean them up,” Brengel said. “Martin Luther King Jr. deserves a day of recognition … For some reason, Black history has repeatedly been targeted by this administration, and it shouldn’t be.”
Some Democratic lawmakers also weighed in to object to the new policy.
“The President didn’t just add his own birthday to the list, he removed both of these holidays that mark Black Americans’ struggle for civil rights and freedom,” said Democratic Sen. Catherine Cortez Masto of Nevada. “Our country deserves better.”
A spokesperson for the National Park Service did not immediately respond to questions on Saturday seeking information about the reasons behind the changes.
JPMorgan Chase & Co. Chief Executive Officer Jamie Dimon called out slow bureaucracy in Europe in a warning that a “weak” continent poses a major economic risk to the US.
“Europe has a real problem,” Dimon said Saturday at the Reagan National Defense Forum. “They do some wonderful things on their safety nets. But they’ve driven business out, they’ve driven investment out, they’ve driven innovation out. It’s kind of coming back.”
While he praised some European leaders who he said were aware of the issues, he cautioned politics is “really hard.”
Dimon, leader of the biggest US bank, has long said that the risk of a fragmented Europe is among the major challenges facing the world. In his letter to shareholders released earlier this year, he said that Europe has “some serious issues to fix.”
On Saturday, he praised the creation of the euro and Europe’s push for peace. But he warned that a reduction in military efforts and challenges trying to reach agreement within the European Union are threatening the continent.
“If they fragment, then you can say that America first will not be around anymore,” Dimon said. “It will hurt us more than anybody else because they are a major ally in every single way, including common values, which are really important.”
He said the US should help.
“We need a long-term strategy to help them become strong,” Dimon said. “A weak Europe is bad for us.”
The administration of President Donald Trump issued a new national security strategy that directed US interests toward the Western Hemisphere and protection of the homeland while dismissing Europe as a continent headed toward “civilizational erasure.”
JPMorgan has been ramping up its push to spur more investments in the national defense sector. In October, the bank announced that it would funnel $1.5 trillion into industries that bolster US economic security and resiliency over the next 10 years — as much as $500 billion more than what it would’ve provided anyway.
Dimon said in the statement that it’s “painfully clear that the United States has allowed itself to become too reliant on unreliable sources of critical minerals, products and manufacturing.”
Investment banker Jay Horine oversees the effort, which Dimon called “100% commercial.” It will focus on four areas: supply chain and advanced manufacturing; defense and aerospace; energy independence and resilience; and frontier and strategic technologies.
The bank will also invest as much as $10 billion of its own capital to help certain companies expand, innovate or accelerate strategic manufacturing.
Separately on Saturday, Dimon praised Trump for finding ways to roll back bureaucracy in the government.
“There is no question that this administration is trying to bring an axe to some of the bureaucracy that held back America,” Dimon said. “That is a good thing and we can do it and still keep the world safe, for safe food and safe banks and all the stuff like that.”
Politics8 years ago