PITTSBURGH--Donald Raikes, senior vice president for customer service and business development at Virginia-based Dominion Energy, has some simple advice for anyone pondering the state of today’s oil and gas market as it treads what is increasingly being recognized as an unprecedented downturn. “If you think you’ve figured it out, you haven’t,” he told the more than 1,200 attendees at the Marcellus-Utica Midstream Conference & Exhibition, which kicked off Jan. 27.

But one thing he did emphatically state during the opening keynote at the David L. Lawrence Convention Center in Pittsburgh was that the industry “is in tough times, but there will be a turnaround.” And what a place to be when it happens, he said.

The Marcellus-Utica region is one of the largest gas reserves in the world and it sits a stone’s throw away from large East Coast markets. As the conference’s introduction video pointed out, “the beast of the east grows larger every year.”

And that’s good news for midstream companies operating in the northeast U.S., Raikes added. “The East Coast has a new thirst for natural gas,” he said, using the lyrics of a hit song from the ’70s rockers Little River Band to illustrate his point: “hang on, help is on the way.”

That help is largely in the form of new pipelines and LNG exports, with the Marcellus-Utica at the forefront of both movements. “We need new markets to satisfy the oversupply,” Raikes said.

“Producers in this area have cracked the code,” he continued, citing predictions from the Energy Information Administration of 37 billion cubic feet per day (Bcf/d) of gas from the Marcellus by 2025 and 14Bcf/d from the Utica by then. “The productivity of these wells is absolutely amazing.”

Markets are starting to show signs of catching up despite the backlog of production. From 2014 to 2016 the northeast U.S. will grow 2.5Bcf/d of gas demand, most of it for power generation. And Raikes pointed out that there is a “dramatic effort to unburden the gas bubble in the northeast.”

That help is coming via pipeline projects and LNG exports.Pipeline projects and LNG exports yielded about 3Bcf from projects put online last year. This year, there is another 4.7Bcf, and between now and 2018, there could be about 21Bcf.

“There is an effort to bring pipelines online and take gas out of this region,” Raikes said.

The Atlantic Coast Pipeline Project, born about a year and a half ago, aims to better supply the East Coast with natural gas. Dominion joined Duke Energy and Piedmont Natural Gas and began work on a 550-mile pipeline project out of the Marcellus-Utica’s heart. It is mostly 42-inch pipeline, according to Raikes.

It already has 20-year agreements and has secured between $4 billion and $5 billion of investments. “The driver of the project is the need for diverse and low-cost natural gas in the northeast,” Raikes said.

Raikes said the design is near completion and procurement is 60% completed. “We hope to begin construction at the end of the year.” he added.

He admitted that the project does face some environmental opposition. “They want to kill natural gas like they killed coal,” Raikes said. But, he pointed out that the pipeline means a $500 million-a-year benefit to the area.

Raikes said the second driver of the help for the future is LNG, specifically U.S. exports. Dominion’s Cove Point LNG facility in Lusby, Md., is one of the facilities at the forefront of the movement and offers a significant piece of infrastructure for the East Coast, particularly the Marcellus-Utica.

The project costs $3.4 billion to $3.8 billion and is expected to be in service in late2017. LNG exports help open up new markets for Marcellus-Utica gas, Raikes said. The project is 56% completed.

“A lot of people ask, ‘Is it worth it to export LNG?’ the answer is ‘yes,’” Raikes said. “Our customers told us that when they heard they could have LNG sourced from ‘Saudi America’ as they call us, it immediately helped their overall portfolios and gave them leverage in negotiating with other countries for contracts and renewals.

“LNG exports are very important for the long haul,” he continued.

Between pipelines and LNG exports, help is indeed on the way, so as the song also asks, “is it really worth the worry?”

Len Vermillion can be reached at lvermillion@hartenergy.com.