US Upstream Natural Gas Producers Compared (2026)

Comparison as of 30 July 2026. A point-in-time snapshot, not an evergreen guide. Price deck (Table 3b rungs, V26): base US$3.50/MMBtu Henry Hub — the fixed-grid rung nearest the representative trailing average of Henry Hub through mid-2026 — with bear US$3.00 and bull US$4.00, all three rungs of the fixed 2.5–4.5/MMBtu grid sensitised in Section 3.2; spot ~US$3.25 and the EIA’s US$3.49 (2027) forecast are 0%-weight cross-checks. Currency: US dollars throughout — all five companies report in USD, so no FX conversion enters this post. Fiscal basis: each company’s fiscal-2025 annual filing (Form 10-K) plus its latest quarterly results; market data at the 24–29 July 2026 closes. Ratings (recomputed on one weighting, Section 4): Range 4.5/5 · EQT 4.3/5 · Expand 4.2/5 · Antero 3.7/5 · CNX 3.7/5. Value reads: EQT and Expand Modestly overvalued; Antero, Range and CNX Fairly valued. Timing spread: the five underlying analyses were struck between 29 and 30 July 2026; Expand and Antero reported Q2 2026 on 28–29 July, so those results are incorporated only to the extent the underlying posts note. Refreshed when the underlying analyses are refreshed. For information only, prepared with AI assistance — see the disclaimer at the end.

Five US producers pull most of the Lower 48’s gas out of two sedimentary basins, and they have made five different bets about how to get paid for it. EQT owns the pipe it ships through; Expand holds under ten years of reserves and must drill continuously to stand still; Antero is captive to an affiliate and pays three times what the cheapest operator pays; Range holds twenty-two years of reserves and no hurry; CNX sold next year’s gas three-quarters of a dollar below the base deck. Put all five on one construction and the headline finding is not about any one of them: only two survive a dominance screen — Range, the highest-quality name, sitting essentially on parity, and Antero, the cheapest — while the two integrated seniors are the most expensive names against their own asset values. No name in this set reads as undervalued and none as a value trap; the five cluster between fairly and modestly valued. To screen these five and every other North American upstream name on the same fields, go to Metal Pilot.

1. The peer group

The inclusion rule: US-listed, US-domiciled upstream companies whose production is predominantly natural gas, above roughly 150 Bcfe a year, and which already carry a published single-company analysis on this blog. That admits the five large Appalachian and Haynesville names below. It deliberately excludes Tourmaline and Birchcliff (Canadian-domiciled — they price against the AECO discount and report on the NI 51-101 reserve standard, so they belong in a North American, not a US, comparison), Coterra and Southwestern-successor volumes inside Expand (no separate listing), Comstock and Gulfport (no published analysis yet — candidates for a future edition), and Antero Midstream and Williams (midstream, not upstream). Every column below is one published analysis; this post adds no primary research of its own.

Every basis difference in the comparison — the EQT reserve-price basis, cost construction, leverage definitions — is consolidated in the comparability ledger, Table 8 in Section 6.1. Read it before trusting any single row.

Table 1. Headline figures comparison, five US gas producers

Source: each company’s FY2025 Form 10-K and latest quarterly results, as analysed in the five posts linked in Section 6.1; market data per stockanalysis.com as of 24–29 Jul 2026. Columns are ordered by market capitalisation, descending, and that order is used in every wide table and matrix figure in this post. One construction governs the operating-cost block: realized price including derivatives and after royalty, less every cash cost line including corporate general and administrative expense, then less depletion — interest excluded for all five as a financing rather than operating cost. Per-dollar rows are dated by the prices above, since each divides by a market capitalisation struck at that price; they use the group’s canonical units, Bcfe per year for flow and Bcfe for stock. All five disclose SEC proved reserves at constant trailing-average prices, so the reserve rows are on one standard; the only reserve-value basis difference is EQT’s price basis (ledger row 2, Table 8). Gaps print n/d and are never imputed. Every basis difference is in the comparability ledger, Table 8, Section 6.1.

Three structural facts recur through the rest of the post. The market-cap order is not the production order — Expand produces 10% more gas than EQT and is worth a third less. The size spread is 6.7 to 1: EQT’s market capitalisation is roughly seven times CNX’s, against a production spread of only 3.8 to 1, wide enough that scale becomes a scorecard dimension in its own right. And the per-dollar rows invert the size ranking — the largest company buys the least production and the fewest reserves per dollar of market value, and the smallest buys the most of both, by a factor of 1.8 on flow and 2.3 on stock.

2. Operating and financial position

2.1 Company by company

EQT is the largest company here by market value and the second largest by volume: 2,382 Bcfe in FY2025 against guidance of 2,375–2,450 Bcfe, or roughly +1% — the flattest profile in the group. It holds 28.0 Tcfe of SEC proved reserves, the most in the set, on an 11.8-year life, entirely in Appalachia and only ~6% liquids. Its cash margin of US$2.44/Mcfe and total cash costs of US$1.06/Mcfe are the best figures in Table 1 on both lines. The structural fact that separates it: it is the only company here whose margin includes revenue earned from moving other people’s gas — US$0.26/Mcfe of third-party pipeline revenue, a consequence of owning its gathering and transmission rather than renting it, and the reason its per-dollar rows are the weakest in the group at 73 Bcfe/yr and 861 Bcfe per US$1 bn.

Expand Energy is the volume leader at 2,622 Bcfe, guiding 7.4–7.6 Bcfe/d for about +5%, on 25.9 Tcfe of proved reserves across Appalachia and the Haynesville. Its cash margin of US$2.01/Mcfe is second only to EQT’s and its total cash cost of US$1.29 third-lowest. Its structural fact is duration, or the lack of it: a 9.9-year reserve life, the shortest in the group by more than three years. Producing 7.5 Bcfe/d against that book means the drilling programme is not a growth choice but a maintenance requirement, and it is the only company here whose reserve life is shorter than the decade its LNG-adjacent thesis is written over.

Antero Resources produced 1,256 Bcfe and guides 4.1 Bcfe/d — a +19% step-up, and the growth is bought, not drilled: the US$2.8 billion HG Energy acquisition closed in February 2026. It is the most liquids-rich name here at ~36% of volume, which earns it the highest realized price in the table at US$3.97/Mcfe, and it holds 19.1 Tcfe on a 15.2-year life. Its structural fact is that the premium price does not survive the pipe: total cash costs of US$2.70/Mcfe — more than twice EQT’s — leave a cash margin of US$1.27, the lowest of the five.

Range Resources is the second-smallest here by volume at 816 Bcfe, ahead only of CNX, guiding ~2.3 Bcfe/d for +3%, at ~31% liquids and entirely inside Pennsylvania. Its structural fact is duration: 22.2 years of proved reserves against production, the longest in the group by a wide margin, on 18.1 Tcfe. It converts that into the second-best fully-loaded margin at US$1.26/Mcfe despite a mid-table cash margin, because its depletion charge of US$0.45/Mcfe is the lowest here by a third — it grew by drilling rather than by buying, so nothing stepped up its carrying basis.

CNX Resources produced 629 Bcfe and is the only company in the group guiding volumes down — 605–620 Bcfe, about −3%. It holds 9.7 Tcfe on a 15.4-year life in Pennsylvania and West Virginia, at ~8% liquids, and earns the lowest realized price in the table at US$2.75/Mcfe while running the lowest cash cost at US$1.03. Its structural fact is that the shrinkage is deliberate: it is converting a long-life asset into buybacks rather than into barrels, which is why it buys the most production and the most reserves per dollar of market cap of any name here.

2.2 Production

Figure 1. Production, absolute and per dollar of market value

Source: Table 1. Companies are in the post’s fixed market-cap-descending order, not sorted by either series, so the flip between the two rows reads against the size ranking. The two series carry different units and are each scaled to their own maximum — 2,622 Bcfe for the absolute series, 130 Bcfe/yr per US$1 bn for the per-dollar series — so bar lengths compare within a series and not across the two; every bar prints its true value. Per-dollar figures are struck at the 28–29 Jul 2026 prices in Table 1.

The two rows rank the group almost in reverse. Expand leads absolute production at 2,622 Bcfe and EQT is second at 2,382 — together more than the other three combined. On production per dollar of market value the order is CNX (130 Bcfe/yr), Expand (124), Antero (120), Range (90) and EQT last at 73. Expand is the only company that finishes top three on both, which is the honest way to say it is the cheapest of the large names on flow.

The two ends of the table make the point cleanly. A dollar of CNX buys 1.8 times the annual gas a dollar of EQT buys, from a company producing one-quarter as much. Nothing about that is a recommendation — it is the arithmetic that Section 3’s value work and Section 4’s quality scoring exist to arbitrate.

2.3 Proved reserves

Figure 2. Proved reserves, absolute and per dollar of market value

Source: Table 1. Fixed market-cap-descending order. The two series carry different units and are each scaled to their own maximum — 28.0 Tcfe and 2,004 Bcfe per US$1 bn — so lengths compare within a series only. All five disclose SEC proved reserves at constant trailing-average prices, so the reserve rows are on one standard and no reserve-code ledger flag applies. Per-dollar figures are dated by the prices in Table 1.

The flip here is sharper than on production, and it runs the length of the table. EQT leads absolute reserves with 28.0 Tcfe and finishes last per dollar at 861 Bcfe per US$1 bn; CNX holds the smallest book at 9.7 Tcfe and leads per dollar at 2,004 Bcfe — 2.3 times what a dollar of EQT buys. The order on the second series is close to the exact inverse of the first: CNX, Range, Antero, Expand, EQT.

One pair inside that is worth naming, because size does not explain it. Range and CNX buy almost identical reserves per dollar — 2,000 and 2,004 Bcfe per US$1 bn — from books of 18.1 and 9.7 Tcfe. Range is worth nearly twice CNX and holds nearly twice the reserves; per dollar, the market is pricing the two books the same. What separates them is what Section 3 measures: how much of each book the reserve report says is worth anything today.

2.4 Operating costs

One construction for all five, restated from Table 1: realized price including derivatives and after royalty, less every cash cost line including corporate general and administrative expense, then less depletion. Interest is excluded as a financing cost. One adjustment makes the five comparable. Three of the underlying analyses benchmarked peers against CNX’s Shale-segment margin of US$1.17/Mcfe, and a fourth carried it in a peer table. That figure excludes corporate G&A and excludes the loss-making coalbed-methane business. On a group basis, on this construction, CNX’s fully-loaded margin is US$0.81/Mcfe, not US$1.17 — the segment figure is not comparable and is not used anywhere in this post. That adjustment is ledger row 1 in Table 8.

Figure 3. Cash and fully-loaded margin per unit

Source: Table 1. Both series share the US$/Mcfe unit and one scale, so lengths are comparable across the two. Rows are sorted by cash margin; this is the one figure in the post that does not use the market-cap column order. EQT’s cash margin includes US$0.26/Mcfe of third-party pipeline revenue no peer earns at scale — on a gas-sales-only basis it is US$2.18 and its fully-loaded margin US$1.09, which would put Range first on the second series; ledger row 3 in Table 8. Depletion is a non-cash charge and is inflated for Expand and EQT by acquisition accounting that stepped up the carrying basis of acquired assets.

What it costs to move a unit of gas varies more than what that unit sells for. The realized-price spread across the five is US$1.22/Mcfe — Antero’s US$3.97 against CNX’s US$2.75. The total-cash-cost spread is US$1.67 — CNX’s US$1.03 against Antero’s US$2.70. The single structural driver behind that is midstream ownership: EQT owns its gathering and transmission and CNX owns ~2,600 miles of gathering. Range contracts from renegotiable third parties at US$1.50/Mcfe of midstream cost against US$5.86 billion of firm transport commitments; Antero is contractually dedicated to Antero Midstream, of which it owns 29%, at US$2.27/Mcfe against US$8.2 billion of minimum volume commitments. The two owners occupy the two cheapest cost positions. A pipeline you own does not re-price at renewal.

The ranking inverts between the two series, and depletion is why. Range rises from fourth on cash margin to second on fully-loaded, because its US$0.45/Mcfe depletion absorbs only 26% of its cash margin; CNX slips from third to fourth because acquisition-inflated depletion takes more of a thinner base. The gap between Range and its peers on the fully-loaded line is the clearest measure in the comparison of what growing by the drillbit rather than by acquisition is worth — Range is the one name here whose carrying basis was never stepped up.

2.5 The three metrics side by side

Figure 4. Flow, stock and margin per company

Source: Table 1. Rows are in the post’s fixed market-cap-descending order — this is a grid, not a ranking, so it does not re-sort. Shading is ranked within each column, never across the grid, because the three columns carry different units: a level 9 means the highest value in that column only. Per-dollar columns are dated by the 28–29 Jul 2026 prices in Table 1. No cell is undisclosed.

The five sort into two structural buckets. There are two integrated seniors — EQT and Expand — that between them produce more than the other three combined, own or part-own their midstream, and are priced accordingly. And there are three Appalachian pure-plays — Antero, Range and CNX — separated less by geology than by how they are connected to the pipe and how much debt sits between the asset and the equity. The bucket boundary that matters is midstream ownership, not size.

CNX leads both per-dollar columns and EQT leads the third. CNX tops production per dollar at 130 Bcfe/yr and reserves per dollar at 2,004 Bcfe, from the smallest balance sheet in the group; EQT leads cash margin at US$2.44 and is last on both per-dollar columns, the only company here to finish first and last in the same figure. Antero and Range lead none of the three — Antero places second on both per-dollar columns but last on margin, and Range sits mid-table on all three, which is the finding for two of the more highly-rated names in the set.

The spread across the group is 6.7 to 1 on market capitalisation and 3.8 to 1 on production, but only 1.9 to 1 on cash margin and 2.3 to 1 on reserves per dollar. Duration runs from Expand’s 9.9 years to Range’s 22.2. Being the metric leader here means leading that metric; it is not a verdict, and Sections 3 and 4 are where the verdict gets made.

2.6 Balance sheets and capital returns

Table 2. Balance sheet, credit standing and capital returns

Source: each company’s FY2025 Form 10-K and latest quarterly results; return on invested capital and share-count changes per stockanalysis.com as of 24–29 Jul 2026. Net debt and enterprise value are in Table 1 and are not repeated here. Leverage ratios are on each company’s own reported basis and are not strictly comparable — GAAP debt/EBITDA for EQT and Range, net debt to adjusted EBITDAX for Expand and CNX, and net debt to EBITDA for Antero; ledger row 4 in Table 8. Expand’s share count is not comparable year-on-year because the Southwestern merger reset it, so it prints n/d and is excluded from Figure 6.

Expand holds the lowest leverage ratio at ~0.5×, having shed US$1.3 billion of debt in six months; Range carries the smallest absolute load at US$0.88 billion. At the other end CNX carries roughly 1.9× leverage against a US$4.84 billion market capitalisation — the tightest coverage in the group, and the reason it screens as the most price-sensitive name in Section 3.2 — and EQT the largest absolute debt at US$5.54 billion, though at a comfortable 0.84×. Read at the low end of Section 3’s ladder rather than at spot, CNX is the name whose ratio moves most: at a US$3.00 deck its adjusted EBITDAX compresses toward US$1.0 billion and leverage moves toward 2.5×, which is what squeezes the buyback the equity is owned for.

The credit and claims-ahead rows separate CNX from the other four. Every name here except CNX carries an unqualified investment-grade or BBB− rating with clean bond-market access; CNX’s rating is not stated, and it is the one company here that entered 2026 with a claim ahead of the common — a convertible note, settled in shares in January 2026, which is exactly why its share count rose 9.05% while everyone else’s was flat or falling.

Figure 5. Leverage

Source: Table 2. Each ratio is on the filer’s own definition and the definitions differ — see ledger row 4 in Table 8; the bar lengths are therefore indicative of order rather than of a strictly common measure.

Figure 6. Share-count change, latest year

Source: Table 2. Expand Energy is excluded: its merger reset the share count and no comparable year-on-year figure exists, per the n/d in Table 2.

The return-on-capital and share-count columns tell one story. The two companies that grew most by acquisition and paid in equity — EQT (weighted average diluted shares 413 m in 2023 to 616 m in 2025) and CNX (+9.05% when its convertible settled in shares) — earn 9.7% and 17.8% on invested capital. That looks like a contradiction until the debt is added: EQT paid in stock, CNX paid in a convertible, and CNX’s high return is on a small, deliberately shrinking capital base. Range is the only company here whose share count fell, and it earns 17.0% — the honest version of a per-share return, because the denominator did not grow underneath it. Antero’s share count is roughly flat because its US$2.8 billion HG acquisition was funded more than half in cash within a single quarter.

2.7 Hedging and price-risk exposure

Table 3. Price-risk position entering 2026

Source: each company’s FY2025 Form 10-K derivative disclosures, at or near 31 December 2025 except EQT’s, which is as of 11 February 2026. Coverage percentages are as each filer defines them and are not comparable across filers — ledger row 5 in Table 8 — so they are reported here rather than ranked. CNX’s hedge book also steps up: 379 Bcf at US$3.28 for 2027 and 187 Bcf at US$3.25 for 2028.

The two extremes are the most quantifiable difference in the group. Antero enters 2026 having sold 770,000 MMBtu a day at US$3.90 into a market near US$3.25–3.50; CNX enters it having sold 448.8 Bcf at US$2.74. On roughly 449 Bcf of hedged CNX volume, the gap between US$2.74 and a US$3.50 deck is about US$340 million of forgone revenue against a US$4.84 billion market capitalisation. Antero’s book is an asset; CNX’s is a tax on this year’s recovery, and it only starts to unwind in 2027 when its strikes step up to US$3.28. This is the row that most directly qualifies Section 3.2’s grid, where both companies are sensitised to the same deck as though they could sell into it.

The other three sit between those poles by design. EQT holds options that protect only against a 2026 collapse and thin to almost nothing by 2027, so it keeps most of its upside; Expand carries the largest book, marked at a US$307 million net asset, spread across swaps and collars; Range is the lightest hedger in the group at roughly a fifth of production, a deliberate choice that leaves its 22-year book almost fully exposed to the deck — the right posture for the name with the least reason to fear the low end and the most duration to wait out a weak year.

Jurisdiction is the quieter exposure, and here it barely discriminates: all five operate entirely in stable, rule-of-law US states — Appalachia for four of them, plus the Louisiana and Texas Haynesville for Expand. Concentration is highest at Range, which is single-state Pennsylvania, and lowest at Expand, which spans two basins and four states. There is no cross-border or currency exposure anywhere in this set — the reason the two Canadian names in the broader North American comparison are excluded here.

3. Asset value

3.1 What the market pays

The primary yardstick here is price to net asset value per share, because it is the one measure every company in the group has on a comparable construction: each underlying analysis builds an equity NAV from that company’s own disclosed reserve value, bridges it through net debt, and states the price it is measured against. What that NAV is built from is not uniform, and the differences are the point of the basis column below. None of these is a company-published valuation. Range’s rests on a 91% audited PV-10; Antero’s credits 60% of a guided acquisition synergy and adds a listed midstream stake; EQT’s runs on its own five-year-strip case and adds the Blackstone-marked midstream; Expand’s adds a US$1.2 billion unbooked-inventory credit; CNX’s leans on inventory beyond the proved reserves. A company-published NAV, an author-built NAV and a raw regulatory disclosure are three different objects, and only the middle one appears in the ratio column.

Table 4. Value against the yardstick

Source: each company’s valuation section in the five analyses linked in Section 6.1; reserve values from each FY2025 reserve disclosure. Prices are per-company and dated in the table because the group did not close on one day. The NAVs vary in estimate content and are the analyses’ own, not company guidance — the basis column states what each is built from and each underlying post details it. The final column is not on one price basis — Expand, Antero, Range and CNX disclose PV-10 at a US$3.39/Mcf NYMEX benchmark, while EQT is shown on its own five-year-strip case rather than its more conservative realized-price SEC case (US$2.749/Mcf after differentials); ledger rows 2 in Table 8. On its SEC case EQT’s multiple would be ~1.35×.

Figure 7. Price against net asset value

Source: Table 4, which carries the per-company price and its date. The parity marker sits at 1.00 ÷ 1.37 = 73.0% of the axis, the same maximum every bar width is divided by. Every company is included; where a NAV rests on a different basis, that is stated in Table 4’s basis column rather than handled by exclusion.

None of the five trades below the discounted value of its own risked net asset value, and the group is tightly bunched around parity. Antero at 1.01× and Range at 1.03× sit essentially on it; EQT at 1.21× is a step above; and CNX at 1.37× and Expand at 1.35× are the two most expensive names against their own asset values. On the harder EV-per-reserve-value measure the picture separates further: Range at 0.86× is the only company here trading below the discounted value of its own proved reserves, and at US$0.55 per proved Mcfe it is the cheapest reserve book in the set — the reason its near-parity P/NAV and its sub-parity reserve multiple point the same way.

One of these numbers has been marked by an actual buyer. In December 2024 Blackstone paid US$3.5 billion for 40% of EQT’s midstream vehicle — the one arm’s-length, third-party price for infrastructure anywhere in this group, and the mark EQT’s NAV credits at its 60% share. It is the exception that proves the rule: every other line in Table 4 rests on a reserve report rather than on a transaction, which is the caveat that sits under every ratio in the table.

3.2 Price sensitivity

Figure 8. Price to net asset value across the price deck

Source: each underlying analysis’s own NAV/share sensitivity grid, read at that post’s base secondary variable and re-expressed as price to NAV against the per-company prices in Table 4. The columns are the fixed natural-gas grid (Table 3b, V26), US$2.50–4.50/MMBtu Henry Hub, so this grid lines up column-for-column with each company’s own sensitivity grid; the base-case column (US$3.50) is outlined. Expand’s, Antero’s, CNX’s and Range’s grids are already struck on this Henry Hub axis. EQT’s grid is on a realized-price axis and is mapped to Henry Hub at that post’s stated US$0.37 Appalachian differential. Shading is ranked within this figure’s own minimum and maximum, 0.71× to 4.32×. All ratios are struck at the per-company prices and dates in Table 4; ledger row 6 in Table 8.

Every company in the group needs a deck above the published forward strip to justify today’s price except two. Antero crosses parity at roughly US$3.53 and Range at US$3.58 — both within a nickel of the base deck, which is what “fairly valued” means arithmetically. Expand crosses at exactly US$4.00 and EQT at roughly US$4.05. CNX needs about US$4.35 — the highest crossover in the group, and a deck 24% above the EIA’s own 2027 forecast. None of the five is covered below the base deck; the cheapest, Antero and Range, are covered within a nickel of it.

The rank flips are as informative as the crossovers. At the US$2.50 deck the order from cheapest is Antero, EQT, Range, CNX, Expand; at US$4.50 it is Antero and Range tied, then Expand, CNX, EQT. Expand moves from by far the most expensive name at the low deck — 4.32× — to the third-cheapest at the high deck at 0.80×, the widest swing in the group and the direct consequence of the thinnest net revenue margin per unit relative to price. CNX moves the other way, holding among the most expensive at both ends, because US$2.53 billion of net debt sits between the asset and the equity and does not shrink when the gas price rises. Only Antero and Range hold their ranking across the whole ladder.

One caveat travels with this figure. It sensitises all five to the same Henry Hub deck, but Section 2.7 showed that CNX has already sold 448.8 Bcf at US$2.74 — it cannot realise the upper columns on that volume — while Antero has sold 770,000 MMBtu/d at US$3.90, above the base deck. The grid measures asset value against price; the hedge book measures how much of that price each company will actually see next year.

4. Rating Scoreboard

The compared companies are the peer set. Every relative dimension here — asset quality and scale, cost position, reserves and life, balance sheet, capital allocation — is scored against these five US names and no others. That is a change from the underlying analyses, and it is a real limitation rather than a footnote: the five single-name posts each used a five-company US Appalachian peer set that closely matches this group, so the re-check moved no star — the extremes that anchor every relative dimension (EQT’s best cost, Range’s longest life, Antero’s highest cash cost) are all inside this set. Jurisdiction, previously split by the two Canadian names in the broader comparison, is now fully unanimous and is flagged as such below.

The weighting is the producer/operator archetype, which is the reference case: the five dominant dimensions — asset quality, cost position, reserves and life, balance sheet, capital allocation — carry 15% each, and the four base-weight dimensions — growth, management, jurisdiction, ESG — carry 6.25% each. All nine apply to all five companies; none is marked not-applicable, because all five are producer/operators.

Table 5. The nine-dimension scorecard

Source: the Metal Pilot Company Scorecard as applied in the five analyses linked in Section 6.1, where every score is substantiated with a sourced figure. Rows are in weight-descending order and carry no dimension numbers — the reordering puts the scorecard’s own 1-to-9 numbering out of sequence, and the definitional numbering lives in the scorecard playbook. Every composite is Σ(weight × score) on the weights in column 2. Range: 0.15×(4+4+5+5+5) + 0.0625×(3+4+5+5) = 3.15 + 1.0625 = 4.51. CNX: 0.15×(3+4+5+3+4) + 0.0625×(2+3+5+4) = 2.85 + 0.875 = 3.725. Bands map from the composite rounded to the nearest half-star, which is why EQT at 4.34 lands in High quality: 4.34 is nearer 4.5 than 4.0. The Delta row is the reconciliation. EQT, Expand and Antero published unweighted nine-dimension means in their source posts; recomputed on the archetype weighting, EQT moves to 4.3, Expand to 4.2 and Antero to 3.7. No band changes, and the re-rate of those three single-name posts to the weighted figure is open.

Reading the table across the rows is where it earns its keep.

Asset quality and scale has the widest spread in the table, from 3 to 5, and it is almost purely a size ranking. CNX’s 3 reflects 629 Bcfe of annual production and a US$4.84 billion market capitalisation against Expand’s 2,622 Bcfe and EQT’s US$32.51 billion — the 6.7-to-1 spread that makes scale a scorecard dimension. Cost position is the row that shows the size ranking does not carry over: CNX scores 4, the same as Range and Expand and two above Antero, which is more than twice its size. Scale and unit economics are separate dimensions in this rubric for exactly this reason.

Reserves and growth trade off against each other almost perfectly. The three companies scoring 5 on reserves, life and replacement — Antero, Range and CNX — score 4, 3 and 2 on growth. The two scoring 5 on growth, EQT and Expand-adjacent, score 4 and 3 on reserves. The one company that breaks the trade-off is CNX, scoring 5 on reserves and the group’s only 2 on growth — it is deliberately shrinking, which is a reserve-life story and a growth story pointing in opposite directions from the same fact.

Capital allocation and management together contain the two lowest base-weight scores, and both belong to companies otherwise near the top. EQT scores 3 on capital allocation — the only sub-4 on a 15% dimension among the two High-quality names — because it assembled its scale by increasing its share count 61% in two years; Expand scores 2 on management, the lowest score in the table, because it has run on an interim chief executive since February 2026 with no permanent successor named. Neither weakness shows up in the composite as much as it should to a reader who cares about it, which is what the row reads are for.

One row discriminates nothing, and it is worth flagging as such. Jurisdiction and geopolitics reads 5, 5, 5, 5, 5 — fully unanimous. All five are pure-play US operators in top-tier rule-of-law states, so the dimension does no work in this peer set and yet carries 6.25% of every composite. It is kept in the table rather than dropped, because an absent dimension reads as an oversight; but a reader weighting jurisdiction should know it separates no one here.

The ranking is not fully stable against the weighting. Recomputed as a plain unweighted mean of all nine dimensions, EQT and Range tie exactly at 4.44, where the archetype weighting puts Range 0.17 ahead; and Antero (3.78 on equal weights) moves above CNX (3.67), reversing the fourth and fifth places the weighting gives them (CNX 3.725, Antero 3.70). Both moves have the same cause: CNX’s weak scores sit on a dominant 15% dimension — its 3 on balance sheet — while its weakest base-weight score, a 2 on growth, is cheap; equal weights make that growth score bite. A reader who weights the nine dimensions equally gets a tie at the top and a swapped fourth and fifth. Range leads on both schemes only because it is the one company here with no score below 3 on any dominant dimension.

5. Summary

Table 6. Quality × Value

Source: composites from Table 5, value reads and ratios from Table 4. The per-company price behind each ratio and its date are in Table 4 and are not repeated here. The NAVs vary in estimate content — Table 4’s basis column states each one — so the ratio column is a like-for-like comparison of construction, not of certainty. The value reads do not follow mechanically from the ratio: CNX’s 1.37× reads as Fairly valued because an ~11% free-cash-flow yield, a cash-flow perpetuity and peer multiples offset a conservative reserve-based NAV. Verdict language is the standard Quality × Value matrix from the Metal Pilot Company Scorecard, unchanged.

Figure 9. Quality against value

Source: Table 6. The y-axis runs the full fixed 1-to-5 composite range so peer groups stay comparable across this series; the x-axis is price to NAV ascending, so cheap is on the left. The shaded bands are the quality bands — High quality at 4.5 and above, Average and below at 3.5 and under — and the vertical gridline is 1.0× parity. The price behind each ratio and its date are in Table 4, not in the graphic. Every point is on the same footing; the dominance screen below is a read of these two coordinates, not a second class of company.

The group clusters, and the clustering is the headline finding. All five sit between 1.01× and 1.37× on price to NAV and between 3.7 and 4.5 on quality — there is no undervalued name and no value trap in this set. The high-quality/undervalued box is empty and so is the low-quality/overvalued box; the market is not systematically wrong about which of these businesses is best, it is charging for it. That is a less exciting conclusion than a mispricing, and it is the honest one. The one name that escapes the cluster in a useful direction is Range, which is simultaneously the highest-quality composite and, on the harder reserve-value measure, the cheapest reserve book — the combination the broader seven-name North American set placed in two different companies.

The dominance screen. Comparing the composite out of 5 against price to NAV as published — no normalisation, no blended score — three of the five are beaten by another peer on both measures at once:

• EQT (4.3/5, 1.21×) is beaten by Range (4.5/5, 1.03×). EQT still has the best unit economics in the group on both margin lines and the strongest organic reserve replacement.
• Expand (4.2/5, 1.35×) is beaten by Range on both, and by EQT on price. It is still the volume leader and the only name here with genuine Gulf Coast LNG adjacency.
• CNX (3.7/5, 1.37×) is beaten by Antero — same quality composite, and cheaper on price — and by Range on both. It still earns the highest return on invested capital in the group at 17.8% and buys the most reserves per dollar of any name here.

What survives is Range and Antero — the group’s quality-price frontier. That is a set, not a ranking: Range is the quality end of the frontier, sitting at 4.5/5 within a nickel of parity, and Antero is the value end at 1.01×, the cheapest name on price to NAV. The screen removes names on arithmetic and cannot order the two it leaves standing. Antero survives by 0.02×, the gap between its 1.01× and Range’s 1.03×; a nickel on either share price would remove it, which is a fair description of how thin that particular result is. Being out-argued on two coordinates is not the same as being a bad company, and none of the three dominated names is one.

There is no cheap-and-weak name in this US set — the value-trap quadrant is empty, which is itself a finding. In the broader North American comparison that box was occupied by Birchcliff at 0.62× and an Average-quality score; removing the two Canadian names removes the only company trading below parity. The nearest thing to a value question here is CNX — the cheapest-quality name is not cheap on P/NAV, and the cheapest name on P/NAV (Antero) is not the weakest. What Antero’s parity price is really underwriting is the HG synergy: full capture is worth about US$2.20 a share and zero capture about US$3.20 less, a US$5.40 spread that no amount of modelling resolves before the operating results arrive. A parity price on a Solid-quality company is not a buy signal; it is a company priced for exactly what it is.

The consensus cross-check.

Table 7. Analyst consensus against this analysis

Source: stockanalysis.com analyst consensus as of 24–29 Jul 2026. Implied upside is against the per-company price and date shown, which is why both dates are carried: consensus targets are frequently struck on a different day than the post’s window. Coverage is thinnest at CNX (12 analysts), which is part of why its discount to the sell-side targets persists.

Every target is above the current price and the average implied upside is 30%, which is another way of saying the sell side is underwriting a gas deck above the published forward strip across the whole group. The disagreement is not about company quality, on which there is broad agreement — it is structural, and it is about the deck. A reserve-based net asset value struck at the base US$3.50 rung supports today’s prices for Antero, Range and CNX, not for EQT or Expand. Figure 8 makes the arithmetic explicit: the Street’s targets sit roughly where the US$4.00–4.50 columns do. Range’s Hold consensus against the group’s highest composite is the pattern worth naming — broad coverage, modest upside, no argument about the business, which is what “priced for its quality” looks like from the sell side.

What this post is not. The shortlist is a set of two names that no peer beats on both axes at once — it is not a shopping list, it is not ordered, and it says nothing about which of the two suits any particular reader. The three dominated names are not names to avoid; each was out-argued on two coordinates by a peer, and each carries a real strength named above. And a ranking is not a recommendation to buy the top of it. To run the same nine dimensions, cost lines, reserve metrics and valuation ratios across the whole North American upstream universe rather than these five, explore Metal Pilot.

6. Sources, methodology & disclaimer

6.1 Sources, methodology & data vintage

This post contains no primary research of its own. It is a synthesis of five single-company analyses published on this blog, each built from that company’s fiscal-2025 Form 10-K and most recent quarterly results; the contribution here is putting all five on one construction. The underlying analyses, with every figure sourced and every scorecard score substantiated, and with the composite as recomputed in Table 5:

• EQT Corporation (EQT) — Stock Analysis 2026 [4.4] — recomputed 4.3/5
• Expand Energy (EXE) — Stock Analysis 2026 [4.1] — recomputed 4.2/5
• Antero Resources (AR) — Stock Analysis 2026 [3.8] — recomputed 3.7/5
• Range Resources (RRC) — Stock Analysis 2026 [4.5] — 4.5/5, unchanged
• CNX Resources (CNX) — Stock Analysis 2026 [3.7] — 3.7/5, unchanged

For the market backdrop these companies operate in, see the Natural Gas — A Complete Market Guide ; for the price regimes that drive the sector, Commodities Across the Cycle . Two Canadian gas producers — Tourmaline and Birchcliff — are excluded from this US comparison because they price against the AECO discount and report on the NI 51-101 reserve standard, as stated in Section 1.

Market data, analyst consensus, return-on-capital and share-count figures are from stockanalysis.com , sourced from S&P Global Market Intelligence and Fiscal.ai, as of 24–29 July 2026. The commodity price deck is from the U.S. EIA Short-Term Energy Outlook , July 2026.

The comparability ledger. Every place the one-construction rule bends, with the direction of the bias:

Table 8. Comparability ledger

Source: this analysis, from the disclosures cited in Tables 1–4. Every table and figure whose basis a row qualifies cites that row by number.

Methodology — the choices, and what each costs.

1. One construction for unit economics — realized price after royalty, less all cash costs including corporate overhead, less depletion, interest excluded. Buys: five margins that mean the same thing. Costs: it discards the segment-level figures several of these companies headline, including the CNX Shale-segment margin of US$1.17/Mcfe that three of the underlying posts had benchmarked peers against; the group figure is US$0.81.
2. Price to net asset value as the primary yardstick, with EV per unit of reserve value as the cross-check. Buys: one number per company that already carries each company’s own bridge through net debt. Costs: the NAVs differ in estimate content, which Table 4’s basis column states and no single ratio can express.
3. The base deck is the fixed Table 3b rung nearest the trailing Henry Hub average (V26), not a house forecast. Buys: a price axis that lines up column-for-column with each underlying analysis’s own sensitivity grid, so a reader can carry a number straight across. Costs: the base rung (US$3.50) sits a shade above the EIA’s 2027 forecast (US$3.49) and spot (~US$3.25), both carried as 0%-weight cross-checks.
4. Canonical units for the per-dollar rows — Bcfe per year for flow, Bcfe for stock, both per US$1 bn of market capitalisation. Buys: the flip between absolute and per-dollar scale, which is the comparison’s main structural finding. Costs: it is dated by the share price behind every denominator.
5. The producer/operator archetype weighting, dominant dimensions at 15% and the rest at 6.25%. Buys: auditable composites. Costs: the weighting is an editorial choice, and Section 4 publishes what changes without it — EQT and Range tie on equal weights, and Antero and CNX swap fourth and fifth.
6. Non-comparable disclosures are printed, not filled. Buys: every gap is visible. Costs: Figure 6 loses Expand, whose merger reset its share count.
7. A comparison-specific figure set. Buys: every figure answers a cross-company question, and every one is an inline HTML/CSS component — this post ships no SVG (rule S19). Costs: none of the single-name figures carries over, so nothing here is reusable from the source posts.

This is a dated artifact. Like the analyses it draws on, it carries market capitalisations, enterprise values and valuation multiples that go stale quickly — the deliberate deviation from this blog’s normal practice of keeping company posts free of point-in-time valuations. Every such figure is dated, and the whole post is refreshed when the underlying analyses are. Data as of 30 July 2026.

Timing spread. The five underlying analyses were struck between 29 and 30 July 2026. Antero reported Q2 2026 after the close on 29 July and Expand on 28 July, so those results are incorporated only to the extent noted in the underlying posts; EQT, Range and CNX are on their fiscal-2025 filings plus the most recent quarter each post carries.

Provenance: EQT Corporation — 10-K Filing — 2025; Expand Energy — 10-K Filing — 2025; Antero Resources — 10-K Filing — 2025; Range Resources — 10-K Filing — 2025; CNX Resources — 10-K Filing — 2025.

6.2 Disclaimer & disclosure

This comparison is for informational purposes only and is not investment advice; do your own research or consult a licensed advisor. It is a point-in-time snapshot as of 30 July 2026 — share prices, multiples, analyst targets and value reads all move. Reserve and net-asset-value figures are estimates prepared under stated SEC conventions and do not represent market value; proved-plus-probable reserves are less certain than proved and are excluded from every comparison here. The ratings and verdicts are analytical reads of quality and price, not buy or sell instructions. A ranking is not a recommendation to buy the top of it, and a name removed by the dominance screen is not a name to avoid — the frontier is a set, not an order. This report was prepared with AI assistance; figures were sourced from company filings, the U.S. EIA and market data and reviewed, but readers should verify before acting. The author holds no position in any of the five companies as of the date of writing.