What’s Next for the US as an Apex Hydrocarbon Producer?

 “Oil,” said Wallace Pratt, the pioneering petroleum geologist, “is first found in the minds of men.”

The United States entered 2025 as the world’s leading supplier of all three hydrocarbon commodities: natural gas, NGL and crude oil. This unprecedented position creates complicated market dynamics that will amplify market volatility and risk, but also create investment opportunities.

East Daley Analytics believes that committing capital to select assets at the dawn of this new era provides significant potential for sustained high returns, especially for private equity.

The quote from Pratt, the first geologist hired by Exxon Mobil predecessor Humble Oil, highlights the critical role of out-of-the-box analysis in successfully deploying capital.

The importance of imagination preceding exploration is exemplified by tenacious visionary George Mitchell’s successful two-decade quest to prove vast hydrocarbon resources could be extracted from shale. Mitchell’s repudiation of conventional thinking launched the fracking revolution that drove the surge in production that has vaulted the U.S. into global hydrocarbon production leadership and created the current opportunity-rich investment environment.

The journey to actionable insights created by the new dynamic begins with macro analysis that integrates precise data on the movement of hydrocarbons from wellheads to demand centers, economic trends, supply and demand, producer strategies and financial returns. The process generates key industry themes to lead to understanding which specific basins or sectors offer the potential to generate the highest future returns.

Key 2025 industry themes

At East Daley, we annually assemble our insights into a domestic oil and gas industry outlook called “Dirty Little Secrets.” The 2025 edition, subtitled “Commodity Ties Create an Abundance of Opportunity,” identifies two major themes.

Theme 1: Integrated oil and gas companies are likely to become more integrated.

Wall Street’s post-pandemic pressure to increase efficiency and reduce volatility led large-cap midstreamers to acquire G&P assets and consolidate in an effort to secure supply to downstream infrastructure and boost margins.

Upstream producers similarly reduced competition and captured synergies through massive acquisitions in key basins. This consolidation has placed the industry in the best financial position in decades, but the opportunities for intra-sector consolidation have become much more limited. At the same time, the sophistication needed to own and operate assets along the supply chain has increased dramatically as the U.S. has become the leading hydrocarbon supplier.

So, what’s the next strategic shift in the quest for increased efficiency and cash flow accretion? For the largest companies in the oil and gas industry, supermajors like Exxon Mobil and Chevron, we see the motivation to gain more control of the infrastructure to move their production from the field to market by acquiring major midstream assets.

This strategy would be a return to the golden age of the integrated companies in the 1980s and 1990s, before the dawn of the shale revolution. At that time, companies sought the highest valuation for their individual assets by separating high-growth upstream assets from less volatile but higher-yielding midstream and downstream assets.

Exxon and Chevron continued to hold some midstream assets over the last decade, but what we’re projecting is a dramatic acquisition of one of the major large cap midstream operators. For example, in “Dirty Little Secrets,” we speculate about a possible combination of Exxon Mobil with Targa Resources, one of the “Big Six” midstream integrated operators that would provide powerful synergies in the Permian Basin.

The compelling drivers of this new consolidation phase are both financial and strategic. A company that pays itself for midstream services gains a much more stable, through-the-cycle cash flow and better transparency on what can be opaque markets.

This is especially important because the Permian and other major plays are not just crude basins, but also important natural gas and NGL basins. Having full control of the molecules across supply chains maximizes options to find the best markets and generate higher netbacks. Strategically, as more hydrocarbon production makes its way onto the water, companies need a more sophisticated understanding of where shipments are going and how to negotiate with buyers.

Theme 2: The sudden emergence of data centers as a driver of energy markets.

Project development is surging for data centers, creating enormous new demand for electricity. These massive centers can consume the electric load equivalent to power 80,000 to 800,000 homes. The construction frenzy is so new that forecasts are constantly evolving, but the most reliable estimates are that data centers will account for a 10%-26% increase in U.S. electric demand over just the next five years.

While utilities are scrambling to meet the expected surge through a wide mix of sources, from renewables to reopening mothballed nuclear power plants, we believe natural gas will be the most available, reliable fuel for new generation.

Until recently, most analyses of future gas demand growth have centered on U.S. LNG exports. The increase in demand for power generation to service data centers will add a second level of consumption, an estimated 91 gigawatts of capacity by 2030. This demand will result in upward pressure on gas prices, and a need for more investments to connect supply to consumers.

To calculate the additional natural gas demand from data center generation, we assume gas would account for 39% of the additional electricity, slightly below the 43% average weighted share of 2023 generation reported by the U.S. Energy Information Administration (EIA). This results in 6.4 Bcf/d of additional natural gas demand, to augment our projected 15.1 Bcf/d to feed new LNG export facilities.

These two main factors, as well as additional demand from exports to Mexico, and industrial and other related generation projects, translates to a need for a 15%-20% increase in U.S. natural gas production.

East Daley expects this increased demand to increase the attractiveness of drilling dry gas acreage, particularly in Tier 2 and 3 basins.

In the current market, gas producers have been focusing on wetter areas to garner higher returns from NGL output. Also, much of the recent buildout in natural gas infrastructure has been focused on delivery to the developing LNG export facilities on the Gulf Coast.

The more recently developed data center power demand is far more geographically diverse, with massive data centers expected online shortly in Virginia, Texas, Georgia, Ohio and Arizona. But future demand can develop anywhere that provides inexpensive access to land, water, energy and fiber optic networks.

Private equity opportunities

Our holistic view of commodity and energy capital markets suggests significant investment opportunities for private equity. Investors could generate significant returns by investing in the infrastructure void created by these two themes.

First, the continued consolidation we expect will also result in buyers seeking to divest assets that don’t fit neatly into a combined entity’s portfolio, or justify billion-dollar investments. These non-core assets are opportunities for private equity, which may prefer smaller-scale investments or ones that have a longer-term investment horizon.

Second, the combined new demand from data centers and LNG exports will raise gas prices and revitalize drilling in dry gas areas that may now be considered Tier 2 or Tier 3 plays. Capacity constraints are likely and will create opportunities for future expansions on existing infrastructure. Serving new load will also require more investments to connect supply to consumers, including new takeaway capacity from supply basins to high-growth areas, as well as to developing data center hubs.

Applying these major strategic themes to analysis of more specific U.S. producing basins produces a plethora of investment opportunities. One logical target, both geologically and geographically, is the Anadarko Basin in Oklahoma.

Highlighting opportunity: Anadarko Basin

The Anadarko was the leading natural gas producing basin at the end of the 20th century. Although it has slipped to No. 5 behind the Tier 1 basins and the Eagle Ford, the region still holds an estimated 200 Tcf of natural gas resources.

Geographically, the basin is well situated to transport gas to Gulf Coast demand and export centers. Inexpensive land and very low property taxes make the state increasingly attractive to data center development, with recent projects including a Google data center project in Pryor, Okla.

An increase in M&A activity is invariably a harbinger for future investment opportunities in a region. The Anadarko Basin has recently seen a remarkable surge in upstream M&A.

Privately held Validus Energy, which exited the Eagle Ford with a $1.8 billion divestment in 2022, entered the Anadarko with a $450 million purchase from Continental Resources in mid-2024. It followed with the $2 billion acquisition of Citizen Energy in September, and the $850 million buy of 89 Energy III in February.

NGP Partners’ Anadarko E&P Camino Natural Resources reportedly initiated a sales process for a $2 billion sale, and ConocoPhillips is widely believed to be weighing a divestiture of Marathon Oil’s former Anadarko assets after completing its acquisition of that producer. With 1,706 E&Ps operating in the Anadarko, the most in any producing U.S. basin, consolidation is likely to accelerate.

Upstream dealmaking is also beginning to translate into Midstream deal activity. In mid-February 2025, Howard Energy Partners closed on an acquisition of equity interests in and assumed operatorship of the 200-mile Midship Pipeline, which can carry 1.1 Bcf/d of natural gas from the SCOOP/ STACK plays in the Anadarko Basin to Gulf Coast and Southeast demand markets.

Howard said the purchase advanced its strategy of “scaling and integrating assets that support long-term natural gas demand.” Anadarko infrastructure may also be non-core to the larger midstream integrated firms such as Targa Resources, especially following a merger with major integrated companies such as Exxon Mobil. Any of the current seven public and nine private Anadarko midstream companies could also be targets.

Profitable investment requires a comprehensive macro perspective, as highlighted by William Pratt, along with a detailed micro analysis to accurately assess specific opportunity valuations.

For example, the current natural gas throughput from Oklahoma to the Gulf Coast is just below 50% of its capacity. However, we project that production in the basin will more than double by 2030. If this growth is directed toward meeting Gulf Coast demand, the egress pipelines are expected to reach capacity in third-quarter 2029.

Additionally, the strong growth in natural gas production will also create opportunity for those willing to look beyond the macro and dive into the micro. Production, processing and transportation of all three commodities will create an abundance of opportunity, particularly at a time when markets for these commodities are closely linked.

The U.S. ascendency to the top tier of global producers of all three hydrocarbon commodities, the swing in the pendulum back to traditional energy sources, the strong financial imperatives driving industry consolidation and the surge in electricity demand are shaping an environment that is creating a wave of new investment opportunities that can offer rich returns, especially for private equity.

However, the most profitable capital allocation requires the willingness to explore currently unconventional avenues, along with sophisticated analysis of comprehensive current data and rapidly evolving trends.