America’s new gas boom. Can the industry meet soaring demand to power AI and export LNG while keeping energy affordable at home?

The core argument

Toby Rice's thesis is that the U.S. natural gas industry should aim for "energy abundance" — deliberately oversized supply — rather than treat rising demand from AI data centers and LNG exports as a threat to affordable domestic energy. "We need to make the energy systems in this world bigger," he says, arguing bigness itself is the hedge against the price spikes that have hit Europe and Asia. He frames this against both the Trump administration's "energy dominance" language and against a rising global instinct toward energy self-reliance following the Gulf disruptions, which he thinks under-appreciates how surplus, not autarky, delivers security.

The mechanism

Rice's causal chain rests on scale. The U.S. produces about 110 Bcf/d of natural gas today and exports roughly 20 Bcf/d as LNG. He argues the resource base can support a 60 Bcf/d surplus at a domestic price of $4/MMBtu — equivalent to gasoline at under 50 cents a gallon — and an even larger surplus at $5 (equivalent to $30 oil), because U.S. shale inventory is directly correlated with price signal. Delivered abroad, that gas would land at under $10/MMBtu, which he equates to $60 oil — economically comparable to what built prior global growth.

He backs the safety argument with two data points. First, LNG export growth since 2016 (when the U.S. exported almost none) coincided with some of the lowest natural gas prices in U.S. history, which he takes as evidence exports haven't driven up domestic prices. Second, he contrasts two shocks: when Russia-Ukraine pulled roughly 10 Bcf/d out of a then-50 Bcf/d global LNG market, European prices spiked from a normal ~$10 to over $80, averaging around $40. When the Iran/Gulf situation cut a similar ~10 Bcf/d this year, prices only rose to around $20 — because the global LNG ecosystem is now 60 Bcf/d and the U.S. is a bigger supplier within it. His extrapolation: get U.S. LNG exports to 100 Bcf/d and the system can absorb any plausible geopolitical shock.

He also points to Winter Storm Fern in February, when domestic cold weather pushed Henry Hub above $7; EQT and others turned down roughly 5 Bcf/d of LNG exports to redirect gas domestically, which he cites as proof that export capacity functions as a buffer rather than a drain on U.S. supply.

What has to be true

Several conditions underpin the forecast. The $4 (or $5) price signal has to actually be there to pull the surplus out of the ground — Rice is explicit that inventory is price-dependent, not fixed. Demand growth has to materialize roughly as expected: he splits the coming increase into 10-20 Bcf/d from power generation build-out (of which data centers are only about 40%), another 10 Bcf/d already contracted for LNG, and a possible additional 10 Bcf/d from buyers diversifying away from Middle East supply — a total 20-40% rise in U.S. gas demand over the next decade. Pipeline and export infrastructure has to keep pace, and Rice stresses EQT's own growth strategy is to match supply to contracted demand rather than drill ahead of it, citing a deal to supply a 2-gigawatt CPV Shea Energy Center in West Virginia (about 300 million cubic feet/day, roughly 4% of EQT's output) as the model — avoiding the oversupply-and-price-crash pattern he says hurt past cycles.

On carbon capture, which he calls potentially "as impactful as hydraulic fracturing," he's explicit about the gating conditions: underground injection is already cheap (under $20/ton), but capture itself remains expensive — DAC can run into the thousands of dollars per ton — so commercial viability depends on getting pure CO2 streams and on hyperscalers willing to pay for verifiably clean power. He puts that timeline at five to ten years. Enhanced recovery gives him a scale argument: the roughly 13 million barrels/day of U.S. oil production co-produces 4-5 barrels of water per barrel, creating over 40 million barrels/day of underground void space for CO2 injection.

Under co-host pushback (Amy Myers-Jaffe) about renewable natural gas and biofuels as domestic alternatives, Rice concedes they're real but small: capturing every landfill methane molecule in the U.S. would yield roughly 1 Bcf/d, against a 110 Bcf/d gas market — "a drop in the bucket." On the risk that countries now want energy self-reliance rather than LNG imports after the Gulf disruptions, he argues for an "all of the above" evolving to "best of the above" approach, and separately argues most self-reliance concerns are self-inflicted policy choices (banning fracking or pipelines) rather than resource constraints — pointing to China surpassing Canada in natural gas production despite starting from a "resource poor" position.

Company mechanics behind the call

EQT's own economics are the proof point Rice offers for the abundance thesis being investable: he says the company has cut costs over 30% since he became CEO in 2019, now breaks even near $2/MMBtu (against a marginal U.S. producer cost of roughly $3.50), partly through vertical integration into pipelines that saved about $0.45-0.50/MMBtu. That cost structure let EQT enter 2026 largely unhedged and capture upside during the February price spike, which he called one of the company's best quarters. EQT's acreage has grown to over 2 million acres from roughly 1 million when he took over. Longer term, he sizes the international opportunity as far larger than the domestic one — 200 Bcf/d of new global gas demand by 2030 against a roughly 450 Bcf/d current global market, versus 20-40 Bcf/d domestically — with strategy summarized as "access premium markets, be the low-cost provider."