Don't Stop Believin' - Appalachia Gas Production Growth Tied to Takeaway Adds, In-Basin Power Needs

The Marcellus/Utica has massive natural gas reserves, but daily, weekly and annual production in the three-state shale play is limited by three key factors: in-region demand, takeaway capacity and gas prices. In recent years, the basin’s output has been rangebound between 34 and 36 Bcf/d and Appalachian producers see only modest gains in 2025. But a handful of pipeline projects and rising gas demand from power generators suggest the Marcellus/Utica may finally be on the verge of a production breakout. In today’s RBN blog, we discuss the leading E&Ps’ production forecasts for 2025 and the prospects for considerably higher output by the end of this decade. 

This is the third blog in our series on recent upstream and midstream activity in the Marcellus/Utica. In Part 1, we noted that while the shale play’s gas production soared from less than 2 Bcf/d to more than 33 Bcf/d in the 2010s, its output through the first half of the 2020s has stayed close to flat, averaging about 35 Bcf/d over that period — ~24 Bcf/d from the NGL-rich “wet” Marcellus/Utica in southwestern Pennsylvania, northern West Virginia and eastern Ohio and ~11 Bcf/d from the “dry” Marcellus in northeastern Pennsylvania. (Note: Only about half the gas emerging from wells in the parts of the Marcellus/Utica that we generally refer to as “wet” includes significant volumes of NGLs; the other half is dry.) The primary hurdle to further growth has been takeaway capacity; there hasn’t been enough space on the pipelines out of Appalachia to move more of the shale play’s gas to demand centers hundreds of miles away.

In Part 2, we discussed a long list of recently completed, under-construction and planned pipeline projects that provide — or soon will provide — additional egress. These include the 2-Bcf/d Mountain Valley Pipeline (MVP), which started up in June 2024; a host of capacity-enhancement projects along and near the Transco pipeline system that will enable more Marcellus/Utica gas to flow into the Southeast; and the possible construction of the Borealis Pipeline across Ohio (and related improvements to the Texas Gas Transmission system) that would allow more gas to flow south/southwest to Louisiana. We also looked at the three primary drivers for Appalachian gas demand growth in the second half of the 2020s, namely higher in-basin power demand from new data centers, expanding Gulf Coast LNG export volumes, and rising demand for gas in the fast-growing Southeast. Separately, in Family Affair, we discussed Kinder Morgan’s Mississippi Crossing and South System Expansion 4 projects, which would let more Marcellus/Utica gas flow into the Deep South.

Today, we shift our focus to (1) what the leading E&Ps in the nation’s largest gas production area have been saying about their 2025 production and longer-term prospects, and (2) how much production growth the Marcellus/Utica as a whole might experience as gas demand from power generators and other big customers increases.

Before we begin, we should note that gas demand in the Eastern U.S. soared the week of June 22, when New England, the Mid-Atlantic states, the Southeast and the Midwest suffered through their first major heat wave of 2025. The Energy Information Administration (EIA) said the PJM Interconnection, the largest wholesale electricity market in the country (reaching from northern Illinois to New Jersey to northeastern North Carolina), experienced near-record demand of more than 160,000 megawatts (MW) on June 23 (see Figure 1 below), and that gas-fired plants provided 44% (or ~71,000 MW) of the power being consumed then. Electricity demand in New England approached record levels the following day, with gas plants providing 47% of the power.