PITTSBURGH—Expand Energy (EXE), the country’s largest natural gas producer, sees southwest Pennsylvania as an area to grow via M&A, a company executive said Aug. 27.
“If you look at all the basins, all the opportunities for M&A activity across the U.S., (the southwest area) has got to be one of the top spots where we would continue to see some further M&A activity,” said David Eudey, vice president of Northeast Pennsylvania for Expand Energy. “We want to be part of those conversations.”
Eudey spoke at Hart Energy’s DUG Appalachia Conference & Expo.
The company’s acreages in southwest Appalachia are more fragmented than Expand’s contiguous acreage in northeast Pennsylvania. The southwestern shales are formed at the southwest corner of Pennsylvania, West Virginia and Ohio.
Eudey said any prospects would have to “meet a pretty high bar” for the company to move forward. They would need to present the right kind of synergistic values and work within the company’s financial plans.
Expand was formed from the merger of Chesapeake Energy and Southwestern Energy in a $7.1 billion merger in October 2024. The new company has not made any large acquisitions.
Eudey said, however, that Expand would consider a variety of options to add new assets.
“We look at all sorts of M&A, as you can imagine, with being a company of our size,” he said. “We’re interested in small deals, we’re interested in organic leasing, we’re interested in big deals also, but they’ve got to make sense to our shareholders’ bottom line.”
Tech improvement
Finances have been key in the company’s ongoing development of technology. Eudey noted that Expand’s enhanced completion program has incorporated artificial intelligence to speed up the drilling process and make far more knowledgeable decisions, referencing the company’s recent success at its Indian Foot operations in Bradford County, in northeast Pennsylvania.
“Usually the questions go something like, ‘I saw this data out there publicly on this pad, and that can’t be right, can it?’” he said. “The data is correct. These wells are some of the very best wells that have been drilled in Appalachia today, after 15 years in the play.
“It demonstrates our ability to tailor completions for specific areas, for specific rock, specific flow units, and to ultimately still create some really powerful wells.”