Activity
in the Western Haynesville — namely the hot spots in East Texas’s
Robertson, Leon, Freestone and Limestone counties — has picked up
meaningfully over the past couple of years. Rig counts are at their
highest level in roughly a decade, production is on the rise off a low
base, and operators are clearly testing how much scalable supply the
region can deliver over time. While risks remain — namely, wells that
are very deep, expensive and slower to cycle than in many other gas
plays — efficiency gains are gradually improving economics.
The
leading players in the area, Comstock Resources and Aethon, have been
vocal about the challenges but also the improving economics in the
Western Haynesville, including shortened drilling times, high initial
production (IP) rates and improved well performance, making the play
more viable than it was a decade ago. At the same time, the Gulf Coast
gas market has entered a prolonged demand expansion, driven primarily by
LNG exports but also power demand tied to data centers and industrial
growth in Texas (see Won’t Get Fooled Again).
Against that backdrop, a small but growing group of producers,
including Mitsui and Expand Energy, has begun building a production
footprint in the Western Haynesville.
That renewed
interest was validated a few weeks ago by news that Mitsubishi Corp. is
acquiring Aethon’s shale-gas assets in Texas and Louisiana. The deal,
which is Mitsubishi’s largest-ever acquisition and includes an equity
investment of $5.2 billion and the assumption of $2.33 billion in debt,
gives the Japanese giant a portfolio that is heavily weighted toward the
Haynesville. Mitsubishi, which holds liquefaction
capacity rights at Cameron LNG in southwestern Louisiana, explicitly
framed the deal around long-term gas demand growth tied to LNG exports,
data centers and power generation, and noted that some of the gas could
ultimately be exported as LNG.
As we said earlier, Aethon
is one of the largest private operators in the Haynesville, with
380,000 acres, roughly split between Louisiana and East Texas. It’s also
the second-most-active operator in the Western Haynesville, after
Comstock. Its total acreage produces 2.1 Bcf/d of natural gas, including
164 MMcf/d from the Western Haynesville. As of early February, Aethon
had one active rig in Leon County and 18 wells — nine producing and
another nine in earlier stages of development, almost all in Robertson
County.
While the deal spans Aethon’s broader
Haynesville position, it underscores that global capital is increasingly
viewing Northeast Texas gas supply as strategically important in a
market where LNG demand continues to reset the U.S. supply stack. For
the emerging Western Haynesville, the transaction serves as timely
validation that capital is flowing toward high-quality, Gulf
Coast-oriented gas resources, even when they sit outside the traditional
core, signaling upside for the non-core play.
The momentum continued last week, with Comstock detailing plans
to continue aggressive development in the Western Haynesville. It said
it plans to turn 24 wells to sales in 2026, up from 12 in 2025, while
maintaining four out of its total nine Haynesville rigs in the area,
including one that is being upgraded to a higher pressure rating to
handle the notoriously extreme geology of the play. The producer also
indicated it may move one of the five rigs operating in its legacy
acreage to the Western Haynesville this year. Comstock also said it
expects to commercialize a data center power generation project in 2026
that’s being developed in partnership with NextEra Energy.
In Part 1, we looked at our production outlook for the Greater Western Haynesville region
— comprising 14 counties. Assuming the rig count stays flat at six rigs
in the play’s four core counties, production from this region would
grow from 1 Bcf/d today to 1.6 Bcf/d by 2035 in our mid-case scenario.
That may not seem like much in the context of the wider Texas and
Louisiana Gulf Coast region, or even the broader Haynesville, but the
Western Haynesville isn’t the only supply growth in Northeast Texas.
Which brings us to the central question of today’s blog: If production
from the Western Haynesville continues to grow — alongside rising output
from the Texas Haynesville and increasing inflows from the Permian —
what does it mean for outflows from Northeast Texas and producers’
ability to access downstream demand?
To answer that, we turn to our long-term forecast from the RBN Arrow Model,
a proprietary analytic model that carves up Texas and Louisiana into 11
regions and provides a detailed view of how supply-demand balances,
takeaway capacity and flows in and out of each region could evolve over
the next decade. Note that we’re continually improving our models and
incorporating the latest actualization data, and the estimates are
updated each month.
We start with the supply side of
the equation, particularly the forecast for production growth for the
total Northeast Texas region (salmon-shaded area in map to right in
Figure 1 below). Overall, Northeast TX production is expected to jump
from 7.7 Bcf/d in 2025 to 11.3 Bcf/d in 2035, with the bulk of the gains
happening in the next four years (dashed yellow line at the top of the
stacked layers in graph to left). In our high case, local production
rises to 13.1 Bcf/d by 2035 (dashed blue line), while our low case shows
production almost flat at 8.1 Bcf/d (dashed red line).
