A slew of fracked gas pipeline projects in the Midwest could open the valve of Appalachia gas even wider, fueling the buildout of gas-fired power plants and power-hungry data centers across the region. Chief among them is Boardwalk’s Borealis pipeline project, a greenfield pipeline with a capacity of 2 billion cubic feet per day (Bcf/d) that would extend the Texas Gas Transmission pipeline system and connect the Gulf Coast to eastern Ohio.
The proposed Borealis pipeline would run 180 miles east to west across Ohio from Clarington, a major supply hub for Appalachian gas, to Lebanon where it would connect to a network of other pipelines that move gas around the Midwest. These pipelines connect with larger, cross-continent pipelines like Rockies Express (REX), Rover, Columbia Gas Transmission, Texas Eastern (TETCO), and Eastern Gas Transmission.
Limited takeaway capacity has long hamstrung Appalachia’s gas producers: without more pipeline capacity, they have not been able to drill as much as they would like because they have not had a way to move all their product to market. Following the shale boom in the 2010s, private landowners and climate advocates fought back against the oil and gas industry, launching successful legal challenges to block new pipeline development in the region. In 2023, it took an act of Congress to mandate the completion of the controversial Mountain Valley Pipeline, the massive 2 Bcf/d pipeline formerly referred to by industry analysts as “the last greenfield pipeline for a very long time.” But tides have shifted in the gas industry’s favor and the Trump administration’s aggressively pro-fossil fuel agenda is paving the way for a new wave of pipeline development leading out of Appalachia.
The construction of Mountain Valley was likely the first domino to fall in a series of new gas infrastructure projects on the east coast. Major pipeline expansions are already underway along the Atlantic seaboard. Those pipelines will help funnel gas to the more than 20,000 MW of new gas-fired power generating capacity–enough gas to fuel roughly 15 new gas-fired power plants–under construction in Virginia, North Carolina, and South Carolina.
In some ways, the Borealis pipeline mirrors the Mountain Valley Project, both in scale and consequence. The new pipeline will add two billion cubic feet per day of takeaway capacity for producers in the southwestern Appalachia basin. Rather than bringing gas to the east coast and southeast, however, Borealis will deliver a vast quantity of gas to the US heartland where it will likely unlock a new wave of gas buildout.
The project is designed to work in concert with Boardwalk’s expansion plans along the Texas Gas Transmission system, the company’s massive interstate pipeline that spans eight states from Ohio to Louisiana. The Federal Energy Regulatory Commission (FERC) is reviewing Boardwalk’s Kosci Junction project, which extends the Texas Gas Transmission system across Mississippi, delivering up to 1.6 Bcf/d of gas into Transco Station 85. If Boardwalk completes both the Borealis and the Kosci Junction projects, it would be the first time the Clarington hub in Appalachia would directly connect to the premium Station 85 market, on the border of Mississippi and Alabama, according to industry analysts at East Daley.
Boardwalk isn’t the only company expanding its network in the Midwest. The Midwest serves as a major intersection for gas transport, with a suite of pipelines that originate in North America’s producing regions, including Appalachia, the Rockies, and the Permian and Haynesville Basins. Not surprisingly, given its ready access to supplies, gas consumption in the Midwest has grown substantially over the past 15 years, fueling a buildout of data centers and gas-fired power plants to supply them with electricity.
Earlier this year, DT Midstream, which operates several gas pipelines throughout the Midwest, announced it would pursue a suite of expansion projects to serve growing demand for natural gas in the region. DT Midstream plans to expand the Guardian Pipeline, a 260-mile interstate pipeline that serves Wisconsin via the interstate Midwestern Gas Transmission system, adding over 0.5 Bcf/d of capacity.
In November, TC Energy completed the Wisconsin Reliability Project, which replaced and upgraded sections of the ANR pipeline system. Elsewhere on the ANR network the Heartland project will add nearly 70 miles of new pipeline in Wisconsin and Illinois by 2027 and the Northwoods project expands the company’s system by 0.4 Bcf/d. TC Energy’s CEO Francois Poirier told shareholders the expansion is “designed to serve electric generation in the US Midwest, including data centers.”
The US Energy Administration (EIA) tracks proposed power generation additions across the US at power plants with 1 MW or greater of combined nameplate capacity. According to data collected by EIA in 2024, there are 418 projects in the 12-state Midwest region that would add over 42,000 MW of new generating capacity. Of those projects, 75 are gas-fired units, adding over 11,500 MW of nameplate generating capacity. In other words, roughly a quarter of total new planned generating capacity in the region will be powered by gas.
Still, the EIA figure is an undercount since the agency relies on self-reported data from power plant owners and operators. In Indiana, for example, utilities have announced publicly at least seven projects would add (or convert) gas-fired generating units with a combined capacity of over 11,000 MW. Only two of those projects are accounted for in the EIA’s dataset. Major projects, including the 930 MW Sycamore Riverside Energy Center and Duke Energy’s upgrades to the Cayuga Generation Station are absent from the EIA’s estimates.
Much of this planned growth in power generation is connected to the projected needs for the region’s new data centers. The Midwest is emerging as one of the nation’s fastest-growing regions for data centers, an industry that consumes vast amounts of power and water. To power their facilities, tech companies are increasingly looking to natural gas-fueled power and have focused on strengthening ties with the utility sector. Utilities, eager to cater to new large-load customers, are proposing to build expensive natural gas infrastructure, often shifting the costs of the projects onto households and businesses in the form of higher electricity bills.
The forecasts for energy demand in the Midwest are staggering. For example, Indiana Michigan (a subsidiary of American Electric Power) is forecasting that the hyperscaler data centers coming to Northern Indiana will use more electricity in 2030 than all its household customers, as reported by consumer watchdog Citizens Action Coalition.
Further downstream, the Borealis and other Midwest pipeline projects will open up yet another growing market for Appalachia gas: LNG exports along the Gulf Coast. The EIA’s latest projections, released in July, show gas production from the Appalachian basin increasingly meeting the growing demand on the Gulf Coast and in the South Central region. The EIA also projects that Appalachia will have lower gas prices than the Henry Hub, which serves as the benchmark for US gas prices, further incentivizing the construction of pipelines that increase natural gas flows out of Appalachia to the Gulf Coast.
There is mounting evidence that both LNG export growth and the rapid expansion of data centers is driving up natural gas and electricity prices across the US. A Department of Energy analysis released late last year found that domestic natural gas prices might increase by 30%, noting that “a triple-cost increase to US consumers from increasing LNG exports – the increasing domestic price of natural gas itself, increases in electricity prices (natural gas being a key input in many US power markets), and the increased costs for consumers from the pass-through of higher costs to US manufactures.” In November, Trading Economics reported that natural gas prices remain high despite record production and storage, due to foreign demand.
At the same time, residential utility bills rose 6% on average nationwide in August compared with the same period in the previous year, according to the US Energy Information Administration, with some of the steepest rate increases in three states with high concentrations of data centers. Electric bills went up 16% in Illinois, 12% in Ohio, and 13% in Virginia.
It’s no surprise that companies across the oil and gas industry are capitalizing on what can seem like hysteria over utilities’ projections of the steepest growth in power demand in decades. Prolific fracking in Appalachia enables the gas industry to continually propose new polluting infrastructure, whether in the form of power plants or LNG export terminals. Just so, new pipeline projects are used as justification for ramping up fracking in Appalachia. Preventing new gas infrastructure in the Midwest–and pushing back against the gas industry’s hollow promises and misleading hype–goes hand-in-hand with stemming production in Appalachia.