Updated, September 24, 2026
By Stephen Heins, The Word Merchant
I have spent more than twenty-five years arguing for energy plentitude, low cost, practical environmentalism and fairness. The last 2 years have not made me a theorist. They have made me a witness.
America’s energy policy since January 20, 2025 is not a slogan. It is a working model. Unleash domestic oil, gas, coal, and nuclear. Shorten the permit. Open the land. Treat reliability as a moral issue, not an afterthought. Then let companies do what companies do when the government stops tying their hands.
That is practical environmentalism. It is also small-c capitalism. And this week, Toby Rice put a dollar figure on what that looks like at the wellhead.
The company as the country in miniature
EQT is the country’s No. 2 gas producer. When Appalachian prices fall into the basement, Rice turns the valves down. When prices recover, he turns them up. He told Reuters the shut-in program is worth a little over $200 million a year. Sell less when the bid is broken. Sell more when the bid is real.
That is not “withholding.” That is the same instinct every Wisconsin farmer has wished he had with a bin of corn. Price still works if you let it.
EQT will produce a record volume in 2026 and spend less money doing it. Maintenance capital is coming down. Guidance is 6.5 to 6.7 Bcfe/d. Longer laterals, tighter operations, old wells given a second life. More molecules, less capital. That is how capital formation actually happens—inside a firm, not in a communiqué from Brussels.
Rice is also chasing demand, which is the part the activists never want to discuss. The proposed POWER Pipeline would move a billion cubic feet a day from Greene County, Pennsylvania, to the Clarington hub in Ohio, where AI data centers are lining up for power. MVP Boost and MVP Southgate push more Appalachian gas toward the Southeast. A decade of lawsuits killed or delayed Constitution, Atlantic Coast, PennEast, and for years MVP itself. That is why Appalachian gas still trades at a discount to its own price. Shut-ins are the Band-Aid. Pipes are the cure.
And on Monday, EQT signed a 10-year deal with Lithuania’s Ignitis: one LNG cargo per year from 2027 through 2036, priced off the Henry Hub and the TTF, aimed at Lithuanian households. Small volume. Large fact. A former Soviet republic that once took Russian gas will heat homes with American molecules. Europeans came to Pittsburgh shopping. An American producer made a sale.
That is the proof of concept at company scale: honor the price, cut the waste, build the pipe, sign the contract.
The country that can still produce
The national picture matches the firm.
The EIA’s September Short-Term Energy Outlook has U.S. crude averaging 13.8 million barrels a day in 2026 and 14.3 million in 2027. LNG exports are forecast at 17.4 billion cubic feet a day this year and 18.6 next year. Natural gas still supplies about 40 percent of U.S. electricity. Coal was not euthanized. Nuclear is no longer a museum exhibit.
Since the “Unleashing American Energy” order and the National Energy Emergency declaration, permitting has been streamlined, federal acreage has been opened, and the war on coal has been reversed. The Energy Department now counts dozens of coal plants saved or supported and tens of gigawatts kept on the grid. Four advanced test reactors reached criticality by the July 4, 2026 deadline the President set. TerraPower has a construction permit. TVA and Holtec have money moving toward SMRs. That is not a press packet. That is steel in the ground.
Hormuz has been the stress test. After the U.S.-Israeli strikes that began February 28, 2026, Iran choked the strait that normally carries about 20 million barrels a day of oil and a large share of the world’s seaborne LNG. Traffic collapsed, recovered in fits during ceasefire windows, and has never returned to a clean pre-war normal. Iran still sets conditions. Qatar’s LNG, which must transit the strait, took the worst of it. Europe paid another premium for the privilege of remaining import-dependent.
The United States did not have to beg. Higher prices pulled more domestic barrels. Strategic releases bought time. Navy escorts and political-risk insurance kept some tankers moving. U.S. LNG, already rising before the war, became the cargo Europe and Asia could actually count on. That is what energy independence looks like when the map turns hostile.
What Net Zero still refuses to learn
The European Union is still married to its Climate Law and Green Deal: 55 percent cuts by 2030, talk of 90 percent by 2040, neutrality by 2050. The Paris framework continues for those who remain in it. The United States withdrew, effective January 2026.
The bill is not theoretical. EU firms still pay two to three times the U.S. industrial electricity rate and several times the U.S. gas price. German energy-intensive production is down sharply from 2022. Employment in those sectors has followed. Berlin is now writing an industrial power-price subsidy because the ideology priced the factory out of the country. Von der Leyen herself has had to admit that Hormuz added tens of billions to Europe’s fossil-import bill without adding a single extra molecule of security.
Renewables grew. Efficiency improved. None of that substitutes for a chokepoint you do not control and a baseload plant you are tempted to retired on a calendar.
America’s emissions path has been efficiency, fuel switching, and technology—not a ministry of dates and heavy-handed rules. Data-center load and electrification are being met with gas, nuclear, remaining coal, and whatever renewables can earn their keep without a mandate. That is “Best of the Above.” It is also the only mix that survives a shooting war in the Gulf.
This Energy Humanist Thinks:
• A company that can throttle production to the bid is more honest than a government that forces production into a glut.
• A pipeline to an Ohio data-center cluster is climate policy for people who still use electricity.
• A Lithuanian cargo is foreign policy you can meter.
• Saving a coal plant and licensing a test reactor in the same year is not a contradiction. It is adulthood.
• Europe’s industrial power-price subsidy is the confession that Net Zero timelines and factory payrolls do not live in the same economy.
I am not suggesting that Brussels to become Texas. I am asking the world to notice what is already working. The United States is producing more oil and more LNG, keeping coal on the grid where electrons are needed, restarting nuclear power, and letting operators like Toby Rice treat price as information rather than heresy.
That is the blueprint—affordable power. Reliable power. Exportable power. Capital that compounds because someone is allowed to say no when the price is wrong and yes when the customer is real.
Energy sanity is not optional. Hormuz made that obvious. EQT made it measurable. The rest of the world can copy this example of Energy Humanism, or it can keep writing industrial subsidies to paper over the one it chose.
Good economics is great!
