Haynesville shale: Calculated re-engagement characterizes operator behavior

America's deepest gas shale is rearming for the LNG and data-center boom in a very deliberate manner. 

GORDON FELLER, Contributing Editor  worldoil.com

Link to full article:  https://www.worldoil.com/magazine/2026/august/features/haynesville-...

Counties in east Texas and northern Louisiana comprise the Haynesville shale formation. Exploration companies began flocking to the region in search of its unconventional gas resources in 2008. But for those seeking out both conventional oil and natural gas, the area has been a point of focus since the start of the 20th century. 

It’s noteworthy that in "2025 Annual Louisiana Energy Facts" (by the Louisiana State Government's Office of Energy’s Senior Economist, http://www.dce.louisiana.gov/page/OEN), the senior economist starts his 63-page report with this good news/bad news opening paragraph: “Louisiana oil prices, oil production and drilling activity fell in 2025. Natural gas prices and production rose in the state, most notably the production in Northwest Louisiana’s Haynesville shale natural gas formation. Driven by the Haynesville shale, Louisiana natural gas production topped 3 Tcf for the seventh straight year.” 

Twelve months ago, the Haynesville shale looked like a basin waiting for permission to grow. Gas prices were soft, operators were nursing balance sheets scarred by the 2022–2023 price collapse, and a wall of deferred wells sat uncompleted across DeSoto, Bienville, Bossier, and Panola parishes. Today the picture has flipped. Rig counts are at multi-year highs, the region's biggest producers are boasting double-digit production growth and structurally lower break-even costs, and federal forecasters now expect the Haynesville to contribute more new supply than any other U.S. shale play through 2027, Fig. 1.  

The catalyst is not a mystery — it is the simultaneous, overlapping pull of Gulf Coast LNG export terminals ramping toward record throughput and a fast-growing fleet of gas-fired power plants built to feed data centers. This piece looks back at what actually happened in the Haynesville during 2025, sets it against 2024, and then turns to what producers, federal analysts, and independent research houses are saying — in their own words — about 2026 and 2027.

LOOKING BACK: 2025 IN REVIEW.  

The headline number for 2025 is straightforward. According to the U.S. Energy Information Administration's Short-Term Energy Outlook, the Haynesville shale in Louisiana and East Texas (Fig. 2) produced an average of 14.9 Bcfd in 2025, up roughly 4% from 2024 — a modest but important reacceleration after a period of stagnation. That growth, while smaller in percentage terms than the Permian's 11% surge, still made the Haynesville one of just three producing regions — alongside Appalachia and the Permian — that together accounted for 67% of total U.S. marketed gas output and 81% of the year's total production growth. 

The 2025 story was really a tale of two halves. Operators entered the year cautious. Forward gas prices were soft during capital-planning season, and many producers said openly that they intended to hold the line on spending, rather than chase volume. But conditions improved as the year progressed. S&P Global Commodity Insights reported in the spring that Haynesville operators had begun bringing previously shut-in wells back online, in response to firmer pricing and a bullish LNG demand outlook, with drilled-but-uncompleted wells (DUCs) and deferred turn-in-lines (DTILs) doing most of the work of restoring volumes.  

This is how it was summed up in “S&P Global Commodity Insights, North American Natural Gas Short-Term Outlook” (April 23, 2025): “Production upside in 2025, and to a lesser extent in 2026, will come from the completion of DUCs and deferred turned-in-lines (DTILs)."   https://www.spglobal.com/commodity-insights/en/news-research/latest...  

Patterson-UTI, the drilling and completions services company with heavy Haynesville exposure, likewise pointed to the region as the standout beneficiary of the year's activity gains. According to Andy Hendricks, CEO, Patterson-UTI, and as reported by S&P Global Commodity Insights, April 25, 2025, "[Patterson-UTI] added multiple rig and frac fleets in gas basins in the first quarter and the Haynesville was the 'biggest beneficiary.'" 

On the pricing side, the Henry Hub benchmark averaged $3.66/MMBtu in first-half 2025, 67% above the 2024 annual average of $2.19/MMBtu—a swing that mattered enormously for a basin where wells run 10,500 to 13,500 ft deep. A 2023 EIA economic study, still widely cited through 2025, found that at $4/MMBtu, only about 13% of Haynesville acreage clears a 10% internal rate of return, while at $8/MMBtu, that figure jumps to 72%. The 2025 price recovery pulled a larger share of the basin's inventory into profitable territory, particularly top-tier acreage in DeSoto, Bienville and Sabine parishes. 

Consider the numbers, side by side, for 2024 vs. 2025: The average daily production, 14.9 Bcfd in 2025 versus roughly 14.3 Bcfd in 2024, yields approximately 4% year-over-year growth, per EIA: 

• Henry Hub natural gas price at a $3.66/MMBtu average in first-half 2025, versus $2.19/MMBtu for full-year 2024, was a 67% increase, according to EIA's Short-Term Energy Outlook. 
• U.S. LNG exports averaged about 18 Bcfd in November 2025 versus roughly 4 Bcfd in 2019, and versus 11.9 Bcfd for full-year 2024, according to EIA data cited in regional reporting. 
• Gas-directed rig count in the Haynesville was 22 rigs in February 2025 versus 52 rigs by mid-February 2026 That’s more than double, according to Baker Hughes and Enverus data. 
• Corporate consolidation: Expand Energy Corp. (the merged Chesapeake–Southwestern entity) completed its first full year of integration in 2025, reporting a 15% reduction in Haynesville breakeven costs alongside double-digit production growth. 

That rig-count swing—from 22 to 52 in a single year—is arguably the single, most important leading indicator to come out of the 2025–2026 transition. It reflects a basin-wide judgment by operators that the demand growth ahead is durable enough to justify committing capital again, after several years of disciplined restraint that followed the 2022 price collapse. 

THE PRODUCERS' OWN ACCOUNTS 

Expand Energy, the largest Haynesville operator following its 2024 merger, closed out 2025 with what its interim CEO called an outstanding operational year. On the company's fourth-quarter and full-year 2025 earnings call, held Feb. 17-18, 2026, management laid out both the results and the reasoning behind them. Mike Wichterich, Interim President and CEO, Expand Energy, said this in the company’s fourth-quarter and full-year 2025 earnings release, Feb. 17, 2026: "In our first year since announcing the merger, we exceeded our synergy targets and improved our Haynesville break-evens by approximately 15%, while achieving double-digit production growth."   

Expand Energy's fourth-quarter Haynesville segment alone produced 3,193 MMcfed, part of a company-wide net production of approximately 7.40 Bcfed. For 2026, the company guided to running 11 to 12 rigs and investing approximately $2.85 billion, targeting daily output of roughly 7.5 Bcfed — inclusive of about $75 million earmarked for Western Haynesville appraisal drilling, a newer, deeper, and still-emerging extension of the play that both Expand and Comstock Resources are now testing. 

Comstock Resources, the basin's most concentrated "pure-play" operator, told a similar story on its own February 2026 earnings call, framing the shift explicitly around price-driven capital discipline giving way to price-driven expansion. 

This is how Comstock Resources management put it in their fourth-quarter and full-year 2025 earnings announcement: "In response to improved natural gas prices, the company currently plans to increase the number of operating drilling rigs it is running from eight to nine during 2026." On his earnings call, Comstock Resources Chairman and CEO Jay Allison said this:  "We added three rigs to our operated program, with an additional rig coming in early 2026 to drive production growth in 2026 and 2027. The additional production, combined with an improved 2026 gas price outlook, will substantially drive down the balance sheet leverage."  

By mid-2026, Comstock reported second-quarter production averaging 1.2 Bcfed, up 16% sequentially from the first quarter, with a nine-rig program split between five rigs in the Legacy Haynesville and four in the emerging Western Haynesville. The company said its first big-hole lateral well, named Dolly Jones, delivered materially lower drilling costs per lateral foot, and it is now evaluating 10,000-psi rigs and 20,000-hp frac spreads for deployment by 2027 to further cut costs and lift estimated ultimate recoveries. Comstock's full-year 2026 guidance calls for production of 1.25 to 1.4 Bcfed, up from 1.23 Bcfed in 2025, on capital spending of $1.4 billion to $1.5 billion. 

Both companies' comments point to the same underlying dynamic: 2025 was the year discipline paid off in the form of lower unit costs, and 2026 is the year that lower cost structure is being redeployed into growth. 

WHAT'S DRIVING THE TURNAROUND: LNG AND DATA CENTERS 

The Haynesville's renewed relevance is inseparable from its geography. Unlike the Permian, which produces gas mostly as a by-product of oil drilling and faces chronic pipeline bottlenecks around Waha Hub, the Haynesville is what Tulane University energy economist Eric Smith calls “a pure gas play sitting directly astride the demand centers that matter most.” 

According to Mr. Smith, "The difference between the Permian and the Haynesville is that the Haynesville is a pure gas play. When the United States began exporting LNG, it represented less than 2% of the total gas production in the United States, but now it is closer to 12% (Fig. 3), and LNG exports now are increasing at a much faster rate than domestic gas consumption, so there is growing competition for supply with data centers and home consumers."   

Two pieces of new pipeline infrastructure did much of the work of getting Haynesville gas to the coast in 2025: Williams' 1.8-Bcfd Louisiana Energy Gateway (LEG) system, which started up in late July, and the 1.7-Bcfd New Generation Gas Gathering (NG3) system, which came online ahead of schedule in late August, both feeding the Gillis trading hub near the Louisiana LNG corridor. Those additions arrived, just as Golden Pass LNG entered its commissioning phase in late 2025, adding another anchor demand source directly in the Haynesville's backyard. 

East Daley Analytics, a midstream-focused research firm, has been among the most closely watched voices on the supply-response question. Senior director Jack Weixel has argued that the basin's scars from the 2022 bust have made producers unusually disciplined about waiting for price confirmation before committing capital—but that the math now clearly favors growth. 

"Fool me once" is the cautionary word from Weixel: "If Haynesville producers cannot get 3 Bcfd higher by the end of 2026 … there's even more upward pressure on gas. You go from an undersupplied situation to an even more undersupplied situation pretty quickly."  

East Daley's base case has the Haynesville exiting 2026 nearly 3 Bcfd higher than where it ended 2025—a growth rate that, if realized, would represent one of the fastest single-year expansions in the play's history. Amber McCullagh, principal at Measured Depth, framed the stakes in terms of the more than 10 Bcfd of Gulf Coast LNG capacity currently under construction. According to McCullagh, "There's not an additional 10 Bcfd of gas waiting in the Gulf for those projects to be built."   

As for the much-discussed contest between LNG exporters and data-center power demand for the same molecules, most analysts see LNG as the larger near-term draw. At RBN Energy's GasCon 2026 conference in Houston, analyst Rusty Braziel presented modeling, suggesting new LNG capacity additions through 2030 will require roughly three times as much gas as new gas-fired power plants built to serve data centers—even as data centers dominate the public narrative. 

Rusty Braziel's analysis was summarized in this way: “The headlines favor data centers. The molecules favor LNG.”   

East Daley's Oren Pilant made a related point: Because LNG terminals sign long-term contracts, they offer producers a more predictable demand signal than the more variable power-load commitments tied to data centers, even though several upstream producers—EQT among them—have said they find data-center demand attractive for exactly the opposite reason: its potential for premium, direct-to-load pricing. 

LOOKING AHEAD: WHAT EXPERTS PROJECT FOR 2026 AND 2027 

The U.S. Department of Energy's Energy Information Administration (EIA) has been the most consistent and most quoted source of forward guidance on the Haynesville, and its position has only strengthened through early 2026. In a Feb. 13, 2026, analysis, the agency laid out its two-year growth trajectory in detail. 

In their publication, "U.S. natural gas production to reach record highs in 2026 and 2027," EIA took a look at the situation: "We forecast that U.S. natural gas marketed production will increase by 2% to average 120.8 Bcfd in 2026 and then further increase to a record-high 122.3 Bcfd in 2027, in our latest Short-Term Energy Outlook (STEO). Around 69% of forecast production over the next two years comes from the Appalachia, Haynesville, and Permian regions. Forecast production from the Haynesville region grows by 1.2 Bcfd in 2026 and then by 1.6 Bcfd in 2027, as natural gas prices remain relatively elevated through the forecast period, Fig. 4. We expect prices to rise from $3.52/MMBtu in 2025 to $4.31/MMBtu in 2026 and to $4.38/MMBtu in 2027, which allows drilling in the Haynesville region to remain economical, even with relatively deeper and more expensive well development."  

On a percentage basis, that works out to Haynesville output growing roughly 8.3% in 2026 to an average 15.6 Bcfd, followed by another 10.3% jump in 2027 to 17.1 Bcfd—making it, by EIA's own framing, the single largest contributor to the more than two-thirds of incremental U.S. gas supply expected to come from the region over the two-year window. By the time EIA published its May 2026 STEO update, first-quarter 2026 data were already validating the forecast: marketed production averaged 120.2 Bcfd in the first quarter, up 4%, year-over-year, with the agency crediting 6% growth in both the Permian and Haynesville regions as the primary drivers, and revising its full-year Haynesville growth estimate upward again. EIA’s Short-Term Energy Outlook, May 2026, had this to say: "We also forecast natural gas production in the Haynesville region, which is a natural gas-dominant region, to grow by 6% this year and 8% next year."   

Independent research houses have offered a longer horizon that reinforces the federal outlook. Rystad Energy's base-case modeling, cited in a 2026 report from the advocacy research group Oil Change International, projects Haynesville gas production more than doubling from 2025 levels by the early 2030s, potentially adding upward of 21 Bcfd of new supply by the late 2030s under favorable pricing. 

Rystad Energy’s analysis put it this way: "The Haynesville shale basin in Louisiana and East Texas is expected to account for nearly two-thirds of net production growth by 2035, but drilling costs there are much higher, due to deeper and more complex geology... for that high rate of growth to occur, gas prices will need to rise above $4/Mcf, with prices over $5/Mcf required for production to reach the projected peak of over 37 Bcfd." 

East Daley Analytics has also published price expectations underpinning its supply forecasts, projecting a meaningful strengthening of the futures curve through the winter of 2026-2027. East Daley projects Henry Hub futures moving back above $4 by mid-2026 and approaching $5 during winter 2026/27. 

Rig count data through early 2026 offer a live, weekly proxy for how quickly the basin is actually responding to that pricing signal, Fig. 5. The Baker Hughes count for the week ended Feb. 13, 2026, showed 52 gas-directed rigs running in the Haynesville region, up two from the prior week, up eight from two weeks prior, and up 30 from the 22 rigs running a year earlier—this is the largest gain in records dating back to 2013, led by Citadel-backed Apex Natural Gas alongside Comstock and Expand Energy. 

Jack Weixel observed this: "This could be the beginning of a renaissance, and it's pretty revealing that they want to ramp ahead of Golden Pass coming online."  

Rating-agency and equity-research voices strike a similarly bullish but more cost-conscious note. Gabelli Funds' 2026 energy sector outlook framed the Haynesville explicitly as the market's designated swing producer for the coming supply-demand gap. 

In their "2026 Outlook: Energy Sector,” Gabelli Funds published this: "Haynesville is the swing supplier and is needed to meet the expected demand growth, especially for LNG. However, the natural gas price Haynesville operators need for a new well to break even is $3.50... Demand for domestic natural gas is projected to increase from 113.1 Bcfd in 2025 to over 136 Bcfd in 2030."  

RISKS AND OPEN QUESTIONS 

None of the 2026-2027 growth story is unconditional. The most frequently cited risk is price durability: because Haynesville wells run materially deeper and costlier than Appalachian or even many Permian wells, sustained investment requires Henry Hub prices to hold near the $3.50-to-$4.00-plus range that EIA, East Daley, and Rystad all treat as the rough threshold for economic drilling across most of the play's inventory. A repeat of the 2022-2023 price collapse—however unlikely that producers currently view it—would again strand large amounts of otherwise-attractive acreage. 

A second risk concerns execution and infrastructure timing. Comstock's own management has said 2027 activity levels remain contingent on natural gas price recovery holding and on producers' ability to lock in supportive hedges, rather than being a fixed commitment. Delays to LNG terminal construction, further slippage in new pipeline egress projects, or a slower-than-expected build-out of gas-fired power generation for data centers could each independently push the growth curve to the right. 

A third and more novel risk is competitive. The same data-center boom that is being cited as a demand tailwind for the Haynesville could, in a tighter-than-expected market, become a source of price volatility that cuts both ways — lifting realizations for producers with premium market access (Expand Energy says roughly half its gas sales now flow to premium markets, versus almost none in 2021) while squeezing margins for late movers still tied to in-basin pricing. 

Finally, the Western Haynesville—the newer, deeper extension that both Expand Energy and Comstock are now appraising—remains a call option rather than a certainty. Comstock has drilled 19 Horseshoe-style wells to date, with an average initial production rate around 31 MMcfd across the completed wells, encouraging early results that both companies are funding cautiously, rather than aggressively pending further delineation. 

CONCLUSION: A BASIN REARMING, DELIBERATELY 

The Haynesville's story over the past 12 months is not one of speculative excess but of calculated re-engagement. Producers, who spent 2023 and much of 2024 protecting balance sheets, used that discipline to cut Haynesville break-even costs by roughly 15%, according to Expand Energy, and are now redeploying that improved cost structure into growth, just as LNG export capacity and gas-fired power demand converge on the Gulf Coast.  

The federal government's own forecasters expect the region to add more incremental gas supply than any other U.S. basin through 2027, a view that independent research firms, midstream analysts, and the producers themselves are — for now — largely validating with rigs, capital, and, increasingly, results. Whether that consensus holds through another full winter of price volatility, tariff uncertainty, and LNG terminal ramp-up delays will be the central question defining the Haynesville's next 12 months.