Leading U.S. natural gas producer EQT Corp. executives said Wednesday (4/24) that they were planning to expand capacity of the Mountain Valley Pipeline (magenta line in map below) to 2.5 Bcf/d from 2 Bcf/d through additional compression after the company’s acquisition of MVP operator Equitrans Midstream closes later this year. Equitrans also this week filed for authorization from the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission to put MVP into service, as noted in this week’s RBN NATGAS Appalachia report. The planned MVP capacity addition is in response to LNG facilities pulling gas south on the Transco pipeline (orange line below) and expected power demand growth in the U.S. Southeast, executives said in EQT’s Q1 2024 earnings call.
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- Analyst Insight
EQT Aims to Expand MVP Quickly After Closing Equitrans Acquisition
EQT closes Equitrans Midstream merger, eyes Mountain Valley Pipeline expansion 'as soon as possible'
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Bring It On Home, Part 2 - MVP Optimism Spurs Williams/Transco Gas Midstream Expansions
It took an “Act of Congress” and a decision from the highest court in the land — handed down by the Chief Justice no less — but it’s looking more and more like Mountain Valley Pipeline (MVP) will be completed as early as by the end of this year, opening up 2 Bcf/d of new takeaway capacity for the increasingly pipeline-constrained Appalachian gas supply basin. That’s shifted the industry’s gaze to bottlenecks downstream of where the bulk of the volumes flowing on the new pipeline will land — on the doorstep of Williams’s Transco Pipeline in southern Virginia. A number of midstream expansions have been announced to capture the influx of natural gas supply from MVP and shuttle it to downstream markets in the Mid-Atlantic and Southeast regions, and indications are that more will be announced and greenlighted in the coming months. These projects will be key to both enabling gas production growth in the Appalachia basin as well as meeting growing gas demand in the premium markets lying on the other side of the constraints. In today’s RBN blog, we delve into the details and timing of the announced expansion projects vying to increase market access to MVP supply.
- Blog
Signs of Life - Williams's Transco Corridor Expansions Give Appalachian Gas Producers a Way Out
Appalachian natural gas producers got good news earlier this month: Williams announced it was moving forward with the Southeast Supply Enhancement project, a large-scale expansion of southbound capacity out of the Northeast on its Transco Pipeline system. Not only that, but it super-sized the project to 1.4 Bcf/d of capacity — nearly double the 800 MMcf/d it had offered in an open season held this summer. The project is one of several brownfield expansions planned to provide additional supply access in Transco’s premium Zone 5 market area, which runs through Virginia and North Carolina — and the first large-scale takeaway expansion to be announced in the area since the long-delayed Mountain Valley Pipeline (MVP) was cleared for completion following years of regulatory and legal hurdles. In today’s RBN blog, we provide the latest on the Transco Corridor expansions.
