EQT chief Toby Rice took part in a presentation by natural gas industry leaders at the West Virginia’s state Capitol last week, briefly joined by Gov. Patrick Morrisey.
Morrisey wants to expand microgrids in the state to power data centers and is pushing the legislature to enact House Bill 2014 to do that. It was one of the priorities he laid out in his first State of the State address.
Rice said that would mean building more pipelines.
“So we’ve got to get serious about this, and these data center opportunities in our state are they’re the reasons for us to get started and start building back and capturing some of the lost time that we had,” he said.
Rice was referring to the eight years and $10 billion it took to complete the Mountain Valley Pipeline, which entered service last summer and now transports 2 billion cubic feet of gas a day from north-central West Virginia to southern Virginia.
Lawsuits and protests slowed the pipeline’s construction. But a push from Sens. Joe Manchin and Shelley Moore Capito got it over the finish line.
Pittsburgh-based EQT now owns the pipeline, and Rice said more are needed not just for data centers, but for gas-burning power plants to replace aging coal units.
“These power plants are not brand new pieces of equipment when you look and you realize that the reliable power generators that are on our grid, average life is close to 30 years old,” he said. “We got to turn these things over, get back to building things.”
Gas has largely displaced coal generation in the past 10 to 15 years because of hydraulic fracturing, or fracking, a gas production technique Rice’s company developed with great success.
Now, though, Rice said the mantra has gone from “drill, baby, drill,” to “build, baby build.”
“Absolutely,” he said. “I think it’s inevitable.”
