Daily Energy Blog

The Marcellus/Utica region is by far the most prolific natural gas production area in the U.S., accounting for about one-third of the nation’s daily output. The shale play experienced phenomenal growth in the 2010s, its gas production rising from less than 2 Bcf/d to more than 33 Bcf/d over that decade. But the pace of growth has slowed dramatically in recent years, mostly due to takeaway constraints. In today’s RBN blog, we discuss how a combination of new pipeline projects, in-basin data center development and incremental Gulf Coast LNG demand might breathe new life into the Marcellus/Utica. 

The Permian’s Midland and Delaware basins have seen their share of midstream success stories the past few years — many of them privately backed efforts to gain a foothold and then expand into the big time. Navitas Midstream Partners (later sold to Enterprise Products Partners) comes to mind; so do Oryx Midstream and Brazos Midstream. Now comes Vaquero Midstream — vaquero, of course, being Spanish for cowboy — the scrappy developer of a gas gathering and processing network in the Delaware. As we discuss in today’s RBN blog, Vaquero recently announced plans to build a new high-pressure pipeline that will double the capacity of its gathering system and a new processing plant that will give it a total of 600 MMcf/d of processing capacity with a slew of interconnections to key gas and NGL takeaway pipelines. 

Several large, publicly held midstream companies play critical roles in transporting crude oil, natural gas and NGLs from the Permian Basin to markets along the Gulf Coast, and all of them are investing hundreds of millions or even billions of dollars to expand their Permian-to-Gulf infrastructure. But there’s a privately held outlier among them — WhiteWater Midstream, which has developed key gas pipelines in Texas and has been partnering with MPLX, Enbridge and others to own and develop a few more. In today’s RBN blog, we look at the growing portfolio of WhiteWater and the WPC joint venture (JV) and discuss highlights from our new Drill Down Report on Permian-to-Gulf infrastructure projects. 

The Trump administration is trying to breathe new life into the long-dormant Alaska LNG project, talking up its strengths and encouraging potential Asian customers and investors to consider it. But the project, a multibillion-dollar plan to pipe natural gas from Alaska’s North Slope to Anchorage and Cook Inlet for liquefaction and export, faces huge financial and administrative hurdles, plus the challenges of building it in Alaska’s rugged terrain and often-harsh climate. In today’s RBN blog, we’ll examine Alaska LNG’s competitive position and whether its reduced shipping costs, coupled with federal support, might be sufficient to outweigh the construction costs and other major obstacles the project faces. 

Taking a nine- or 10-figure energy infrastructure project from concept to fruition is never easy. Siting dilemmas, permitting woes, commitment-wary customers, financing snags, legal challenges — there are seemingly endless hurdles. And that’s in normal times. Add in market volatility and fast-changing governmental policies and a developer’s job becomes darn-near impossible. In today’s RBN blog, we discuss midstream companies’ uphill battle in advancing infrastructure projects in 2025, focusing on a recently announced greenfield natural gas storage project along the Texas Gulf Coast. 

What happens when almost everybody is on the same side of a trade and the fundamentals flip? Yup, max pain. Everyone races for the exits at the same time, sending the market into speculative liquidation mode and causing cascading losses. It can get frantic and ugly — tens or even hundreds of millions of dollars are at stake, and no one’s sure how bad things might get. As we discuss in today’s RBN blog, frantic and ugly is precisely what happened over the last few days at the Waha natural gas trading hub in West Texas. 

Growing power demand for data centers has been one of the biggest stories in energy markets over the past year, with natural gas-fired power plants emerging as the primary choice for developers seeking to provide the 24/7 power these massive, energy-intensive sites require. That has led many energy firms to unveil plans to sell power directly to data centers but many tech giants have also announced their own deals. In today’s RBN blog, we’ll dive into recent announcements from firms like Apple, Amazon, Google, Meta and Microsoft, which intend to collectively spend about $300 billion this year alone to boost their AI (artificial intelligence) capabilities.