Who's driving US gas growth? Increasingly, companies that won't tell you

A rig- and frac-based approach to projecting where production is headed

US dry gas production surged 2.6 Bcfd between September 2025 and April 2026, the most recent month of reported EIA data. The biggest driver of growth over this period was likely Expand, whose strategy of deferring both completions and TILs was well publicized. But the next-largest increment came from Apex, a private operator that issues no production guidance.

And this trend is likely to continue. Most public gas E&Ps operate in Appalachia, where production growth will likely remain slow, limited by modest incremental takeaway capacity and in-basin demand growth. The largest Permian operators are public, but these companies often do not break out dry-gas production guidance separately from their rich-gas or Boe figures. Haynesville acreage, meanwhile, has consolidated, but mostly into the hands of Japanese conglomerates that don’t give detailed Lower-48 gas production guidance, either.

As a result, accurately anticipating near-term Lower-48 gas production inflection points will increasingly depend on synthesizing satellite and state-reported data.

First, estimating current production

Before we can synthesize activity levels into an estimate of run-rate growth, we need to understand current well-by-well production. To do that, I developed an algorithm that estimates likely unreported spuds and completions¹ in a multi-step process:

1. Estimating a rig’s (or frac crew’s) capacity for additional spuds (or completions), beyond what has been reported, based on how long it was observed on a pad and typical drilling (or completion) times in that play

2. Netting out reported spuds or completions on the pad, and

3. Constraining this by the availability of candidate wells on that pad that have been permitted (or drilled)

Which companies drove recent growth?