Whether it’s rate of penetration or company culture, EQT has a metric for it.
Those benchmarking efforts have helped the vertically integrated company grow and improve its performance in several areas. As of the end of last year, EQT represented 6% of US natural gas output, and its 2025 Appalachian Basin well productivity was 35% higher than its peer average, according to Enverus data.
According to Sarah Fenton, EQT’s executive vice president of upstream, part of the Pennsylvania-based operator’s success comes down to their focus on benchmarking.
JPT caught up with Fenton, who leads drilling, completions, production operations, and subsurface science and engineering for EQT’s 7.5 Bcf/D Appalachian Basin program, to learn how the operator is applying new technologies and processes in developing its wells, growing its inventory, improving its emissions metrics, and protecting its culture.
This conversation has been edited for length and clarity.
JPT: How has advancing technology changed how EQT develops its wells?
SF: We think of ourselves as very tech driven. There’s field technology and technology we use in the office. In field technology, there’s developing new wells, and there’s producing existing wells. Where we’ve come from a drilling and completions perspective is rather remarkable. Think back to where we were 20, 25 years ago. The rig capability, the hydraulic fracturing capability was, we’ll call it low-performing rigs and low-pressure equipment, heavy emissions, a lot of nonproductive time. Today at EQT, we develop about 1½ million feet a year, with about 110 wells to do that. And we need two to four drill rigs and two to three frac fleets. Years ago, just maintaining about 200 to 250 Bcf a year would’ve taken us a dozen rigs and a dozen frac fleets. We’ve come a long way in operational technology.
That translates into our ability to develop wells with less resources and less capital costs, paired with our ability to go deeper and further. Years ago, it was one well on a pad, and it was a short lateral. Now EQT does combo development, which is the sequencing piece of our operations. We’ll bring two to four pads together, develop them together, 10, 20, 30, 40 wells at a time. Three-mile-plus laterals are normal for us. The longer we can go, the less dollar per foot it costs us, and combo development is going to keep our cost down. Operational technology ultimately translates into safety, efficiency, and cost savings.
JPT: How do you identify and prioritize new technologies and methods to use in your developments?
SF: At EQT, about 80% of our development is standard. We have a standard well design we have found that is best for market conditions. For us, 80% of our development gets that design. What’s beautiful about that is it establishes a baseline for operational performance, cost performance, and safety performance.
The other approximately 20% of our development program is science and discovery. We are looking at how to evolve those well designs methodically. Science for us is improving well performance, and discovery is inventory growth.
For well performance, we know that there are about 60 things that are very important to standardize, and we call these our EQT Well Design parameters. There are many variables and parameters that go into drilling a well, fracking a well, and producing a well. But we think there’s 60 that are important enough to standardize because they have more than a 5% impact on costs or more than 5% impact on EUR (estimated ultimate recovery).
For science, it has to move the needle. It’s either a penny on finding and development or a penny on NYMEX breakeven. Turns out that’s very tough to do. For us, that’s a 5% improvement in ultimate recovery or $20/ft savings. When we do science, we’ve got to do it on needle-mover things, and it’s got to be ranked high on our list. Of those 60 parameters, we’ve ranked them from one through 60, what’s most important for well economics all the way down to the least important. It’s usually the top 10 to 20 that we’ll do science on.
The science is nothing unique. It’s design of experiments. It’s the seventh-grade scientific method. It’s very basic. But I’ll tell you, when things are simple, you can evolve fast.
JPT: How is science helping you with inventory growth?
SF: Discovery is inventory growth for us, tapping into new areas. Maybe it’s a tier-two or tier- three rock. Maybe it’s tier four or tier five, but we see some potential in there. What we try and understand is, what is it going to take to make that non-core rock today compete with our core inventory? Is it the way we target the rock? Have we figured out the zone we want to drill in? Maybe it’s the frac job design. Maybe it’s something that we want to test to say, ‘Hey, can we get it to a point where it can compete with our core?’ We drill our best stuff first, so of course we’re drilling all our tier-one rock, and we have decades left of tier one, but it’s not infinite. You still have to think about backfilling that. What are we going to backfill it with? Will our tier-two rock turn into tier-one? Sure, eventually. But is there another non-core asset out there today that can tap into and compete with tier one? We don’t know. We’re using our discovery program to do that.
It’s a gentle exploration. We’re not doing rank exploration and looking for the next Marcellus play or looking for the next Permian. We’re staying pretty close to home. We step up, we step out, we step down around our Appalachia Basin footprint to identify new horizons or areas that might be on the fringe that we haven’t proven up yet.
JPT: How is EQT using benchmarking and partnerships to improve wells?
SF: Making a well better, this is where you have a really good business partner. Oftentimes you’ll hear folks talk about contractors and service providers. We change the word. It’s a business partner. And what a difference two words makes. You’re now in business together, and you’re a partner. It’s very different from a service provider and an operator. A lot of the tech and innovation comes out of our business partners. Let’s be honest. They’re the experts. They’re the ones actually drilling the wells. They’re the ones actually fracking the wells. It’s our acreage, our minerals, our well designs, but they’re doing it for us. Having a really good business partnership, that is where the magic happens.
We work together on improving different key performance indicators (KPIs), and then, more importantly, benchmarking. Our business partners provide services for other operators in the basin. For EQT, we are always benchmarking. We want to know where we’re at and how we compare against the competition, because we love winning. And if we’re not winning yet, we want to know why. Our business partners can anonymize the data. They can tell us where we are compared to peers, but more importantly, we can learn what are we doing differently that others aren’t. A real good example is over the past 2 years, we have improved completions efficiencies by nearly 50%. Now, some might say, ‘I thought we were at the max for shale. I thought we had reached the best well design out there, and we can’t get any better. How did you do it?’ We worked with our business partners to do that. We asked, ‘Where do we need to be? Where are others at? Where are some of the gaps?’ And then we made the economic decisions to close those gaps.
JPT: What about advances in technology for the office—are you seeing similar improvements there as well?
SF: For the office technology supporting our geoscientists and petroleum engineers, 20 years ago we used spreadsheets, Access databases. Knowledge was power, almost, and now we have almost democratized it because our ability to access data is fast. The public data that’s available now that we have access to, the frequency of the data that’s coming in, and the computational power that we have to assess and digest the information to make that information relevant for us has come a long way. That translates into speed to what we call insight to action, the speed of using that information to make decisions with.
Twenty years ago, we had technicians maintaining enterprise apps with specialized groups trying to understand the data, and then we had the operational teams trying to execute it. We’ve combined that all into one in EQT. It’s directly connected with sensors in the field. It’s coming in, and we’ve got quality-assurance and quality-control checks set up so that data is trustworthy, or it gets flagged. Now we have that almost automated. And everyone who is mostly some sort of computer-based specialist, they’re 100% remote. From my phone, I can see how my rig is performing. I could see how my frac job is performing. I can turn on and off a well from my phone because of that operational technology that we have available.
JPT: EQT benchmarks many metrics. How does that drive the culture?
SF: I’ve seen different operating models and different cultures. At EQT, we start with what we’re going to do, what good looks like, and who’s going to do it? It starts at the top with a mission alignment exercise. What are we accomplishing this year for EQT? Then that trickles down to each department and what they own—the drilling department, the completions department, the production department. Now we’re all aligned, all the way up to the top. We know what we’re going to do. Next, what does good look like? How do we know if we’re winning? What is a good drilling program? Oh, it’s rate of penetration, it’s cost per foot, it’s safety. What are the targets? We’re firm believers in you can’t improve what you don’t measure, so we measure everything. We even measure culture. We have nearly 2,000 KPIs, and they continue to grow.
We’re going to set what good looks like on some of those crew metrics, and every quarter you’re sitting down and talking with your manager, or even looking at your own dashboard to see, ‘Where am I off? Where am I trending down? Where am I meeting expectations?’ And then you get to course-correct.
It’s a great program that was brought over to EQT from the Rice Energy acquisition. I was with Rice Energy before EQT, and Rice Energy outperformed its peers by 45%. How did they do it? They had the same rock-ish, had the same equipment-ish. And I’d argue maybe our people are a little better. But if all those were the same, what was different? It was our operating model, our culture.
JPT: What’s one of EQT’s major emissions-reduction initiatives?
SF: We’re a founding member of the Appalachia Methane Initiative (AMI). As part of AMI, we have now supported satellite and aerial surveys, covering nearly 17,000 sites across approximately 31,800 square miles. Using that data from satellites, aerial surveys, ground sensors, combined with our operational data, we can now see and prove that Appalachia is the lowest methane-intensity basin in the US. AMI reported a 0.52% methane loss rate for the full Appalachian natural gas supply chain, while EQT reports a 0.007% production segment scope 1 methane-emissions intensity.
How did we do it? We tackled the biggest source with the lowest abatement cost first. The single biggest emission source for us was pneumatic devices. They used to use field gas or natural gas to actuate equipment, and we’ve changed that. Over 2 years of the Pneumatic Device Replacement Blitz, we replaced or retrofitted nearly 9,000 devices with electric actuators, air compressors, and other fit-for-purpose solutions. The program was initially projected to cost about $20 million and was completed at about $28 million, with roughly $3 per metric ton of CO2e abated.
JPT: What is your philosophy about using AI?
SF: We are just in the beginning with AI. We have not figured it all out at EQT, but here’s what we do know. AI is built on a foundation of data that’s structured, clean, and trustworthy. If you don’t have structured data that’s clean and trustworthy, it is garbage in equals garbage out.
Today, the way we think about AI is doing remedial and administrative tasks. Being able to leverage technology so that we can work faster, quicker, remove some of those administrative tasks that we used to do and have tech do that for us accelerates our petroleum engineers and geoscientists to be the domain experts and focus on that instead of the more remedial or mundane type tasks. We want to have AI do the dishes and laundry, the stuff we don’t like doing, so we can garden and paint.
We’re not trying to boil the ocean with AI. Instead, ‘What is some of the stuff we hate doing? I hate submitting all these permits. For this one air permit, I have to submit 25 different permits. How can I speed this up? It’s the same thing every single time. Do I have a way to submit all these permits, and then, more importantly, when I get feedback, how can I fix that and learn to not make that mistake again?’ It’s laundry and dishes where we want AI to be doing our work for us today, so our engineers and scientists can garden and paint.
Going forward, AI could be very transformative. We can take those domain experts, those folks who know some of the fundamentals around petroleum engineering and geosciences, and then transform them into something that allows them to quickly react, to look at more data than they would’ve ever had access to, to make some of those decisions. Think about that 40-year veteran versus the 5-year person right out of school. We can almost bring them together using AI. All of that knowledge that was stored in journal articles and papers and conference proceedings that were written by those folks with senior experience, we can leverage that in our AI tool to accelerate that next gen. It’s going to be a big accelerator for our domain experts.
JPT: Speaking of accelerating the capabilities of experts, what would you say to the next generation entering the oil and gas industry?
SF: Lean into this moment, and be part of the solution, because the energy industry is entering one of the most important and dynamic periods in its history, and you will have the opportunity to be part of shaping it and directing it.
We are at the leading edge of a global energy expansion. Demand is growing rapidly, driven by electrification, AI and data centers, and global prosperity. Natural gas will play a critical role in meeting that demand—reliably, affordably, and with lower emissions and abundance.
That means there has never been a greater need for petroleum engineers, geoscientists, and energy professionals. The next generation of petroleum engineers and geoscientists will literally help fuel the future and make our energy better.
Even more important, take pride in the impact of what you’ll do as a petroleum engineer and geoscientist. Energy is the foundation of modern life. It is directly correlated to prosperity. It enables economic growth, improves quality of life, and supports global progress. The world is demanding prosperity, and natural gas will be the fuel of choice to deliver it.
This industry needs people who understand both the opportunity and the responsibility that comes with it. Petroleum engineers and geoscientists will be the technical and operational leaders the world needs to continue to grow and thrive.
