EQT Buys Range Resources to Pass 9 Bcfe a Day in Appalachia

EQT Corporation and Range Resources agreed on 26 October 2026 to combine in an all-stock transaction, with each Range share exchanged for 0.987 shares of EQT. The boards of both companies approved the merger agreement unanimously. EQT's existing shareholders are expected to hold about 73 per cent of the combined company and Range's shareholders about 27 per cent.

The companies said the combination will produce more than 9 Bcfe a day of net natural gas, hold more than 30 years of drilling inventory across nearly 3 million net acres and own more than 3,700 miles of midstream infrastructure. Both operate in the Appalachian Basin and both grew out of the Marcellus Shale. Range is headquartered in Fort Worth, Texas, and the combined company will be run by EQT's management team from Canonsburg, Pennsylvania.

The $50bn in the announcement is not the price

EQT's release describes a pro forma enterprise value of more than $50bn. That is the size of the merged company including its debt, not what EQT is paying for Range. The announcement discloses no transaction value, no premium and no implied price per Range share, and the exchange ratio alongside the 27 per cent ownership split is the only arithmetic the companies offer. Reuters described the deal on 26 October as valued at more than $50 billion, which repeats the companies' framing of the combined entity rather than measuring the consideration.

Most of the rest of the case is projection. EQT expects $325m of base annual synergies within two years across corporate, operations and commodities marketing, with what it calls a pathway to more than $600m over the longer term from development and infrastructure optimisation and from gas, LNG and NGL marketing. It says the deal improves its unlevered free cash flow breakeven to less than $2 per MMBtu and projects roughly $20bn of cumulative free cash flow over the next five years at recent strip pricing. Those are non-GAAP measures, and the release says EQT will not reconcile the projections to cash flow from operations.

Demand-led growth is a sentence about buyers

EQT's language points at customers rather than at barrels. The release calls the combined business the clear partner of choice for end users of natural gas and frames the moment as the next era of demand-led natural gas growth, which in Appalachia means power plants, LNG terminals and the data centres competing for both. Fortune, writing on 26 October, tied the deal to data centre and export demand. Parallax Nexus has reported on FERC's rejection of the core of PJM's plan for connecting large data centre loads, and on the Energy Department order that let PJM plants run past their permit limits, two measures of how tight the regional supply picture has become.

Closing is expected during the first quarter of 2027, subject to regulatory approvals and clearances and to votes by both sets of shareholders. Two Range representatives, including president and chief executive Dennis L. Degner, will join EQT's board. Citi and RBC Capital Markets advised EQT, with Kirkland & Ellis as its legal counsel; Evercore was lead financial adviser to Range, J.P. Morgan Securities also advised, and Gibson, Dunn & Crutcher acted as Range's counsel. EQT intends to file a Form S-4 containing a joint proxy statement and prospectus.

One detail shows how quickly this was assembled. Both companies cancelled the third-quarter earnings calls they had scheduled for 28 October while still planning to publish the results after the market closes on 27 October, so investors get the quarter's numbers without the chance to ask about them. The announcement is also silent on antitrust, beyond listing required approvals as a closing condition, which is a striking silence for a deal that puts the two largest producers in a single basin under one management.