ERCOT's Signed, Near-Term Gas Is Concentrated in West Texas

An earlier Tafel Power Brief showed that ERCOT's 69.7 GW gas queue narrows to 8.8 GW of signed, near-term merchant gas that clears a strict screen this cycle: signed interconnection agreement, in service by 2028, and merchant rather than public-authority self-build. That number answered how much, but not where, and where turns out to matter more.

What matters is whether there is screened gas behind your zone. ERCOT is one market on paper, but it is divided by internal transmission constraints, so firm capacity in one zone does not always deliver to a load in another without congestion and basis risk. When you map the 8.8 GW, the supply and the demand are not in the same place.

Where the screened gas actually sits

The 8.8 GW breaks down by ERCOT zone as follows. West Texas, the Permian corridor, holds 5.3 GW, about 60 percent of the screened set. South holds 2.3 GW. Houston holds 1.2 GW. The North zone, the Dallas-Fort Worth metro, holds 0.02 GW, a single 21 MW repowering of an existing plant, not a material new-build gas addition.

The zone with the most concentrated data-center interest has essentially no screened gas that has cleared an interconnection agreement and is positioned for potential delivery this cycle.

North looks supplied until you check the interconnection agreements

The trap is that North does not look empty in the raw queue. It shows 4.8 GW of near-term gas across fifteen projects with a 2026 to 2028 in-service date. A developer or an offtaker scanning the queue for capacity near DFW would see plenty of it.

Almost none of it has signed. Of that 4.8 GW of near-term North gas, 0.02 GW holds a signed interconnection agreement. The conversion rate from near-term queue to signed is 0.4 percent. Houston is the opposite: 1.2 GW near-term, 1.17 GW signed, a conversion rate near 98 percent. West converts about half of its near-term queue, and South about a quarter.

So the queue by zone is really a map of where developers have filed intentions rather than a map of supply. The signed set is a much better map of where screened gas is most likely to arrive, and the two maps disagree most exactly where the load wants to be.

What this changes for each buyer

Hyperscaler energy leads siting a load. Site selection and power procurement are the same decision, not two. A site in the North load pocket has almost no new signed, near-term gas behind the zone. That does not make North impossible, but it converts the power question from contracting to transmission: you are betting on West and South generation reaching you, which is a basis and congestion exposure, not a signed offtake. West Texas is where the screened gas is, and the siting decision should weigh that against water, land, and latency.

Infra funds underwriting a gas platform. Zone concentration is concentration risk. Sixty percent of the screened set sits in West Texas, much of it exposed to the same Permian gas basis and the same transmission paths out of the region. A platform valued on ERCOT-wide signed, near-term gas scarcity is really valued on a handful of West Texas nodes. Diligence the node, the transmission out of the zone, and the basis rather than the ERCOT aggregate.

Developers holding positions. A signed interconnection agreement in the North zone is a genuinely scarce asset, far scarcer than the raw North queue suggests, because the rest of that queue has not cleared the same bar. The value of a signed North position is set by the near-absence of competing signed supply, not by the crowded list of unsigned filings around it.

The geographic screen does not establish firm fuel supply. West Texas projects still require diligence on pipeline transport, laterals, storage, pressure, and basis exposure. West Texas is also drawing captive generation built for named data-center loads, which is not part of the merchant seller set but competes for the same turbines, construction resources, and gas infrastructure. See The ERCOT Queue Cannot Distinguish Captive Gas from Speculation.

This is one of a four-Brief series on the firm-power decision: how much capacity is credible, what powers a 24/7 data center, who controls the screened merchant set, and where the load should sit.

Methodology

Figures are drawn from the ERCOT June 2026 GIS Report (Large and Small Gen, projects with a Full Interconnection Study requested) and reconciled against an archived snapshot of that source before publication. Zone is the report's CDR zone. "Signed IA" reflects the report's IA Signed field, corroborated by the GIM Study Phase field; where the two disagree, the more conservative non-signed reading is used. Near-term means a developer-requested in-service date of 2026 to 2028, which skews optimistic and should be read as an upper bound. Merchant excludes cooperatives, municipal utilities, and public authorities. Several of the largest screened projects are in Texas Energy Fund due diligence, which carries its own financing conditions a buyer should confirm before treating a project as commercially available. Figures reflect the June 2026 snapshot and may have changed since. Status is current as of July 2026.

Because the 8.8 GW figure is derived from multiple filters applied to ERCOT GIS fields, it should be read as Tafel Power's filtered estimate of merchant, signed, near-term gas capacity, not as an ERCOT-published category. The screened set identifies projects meeting public queue criteria. It does not establish that the capacity is uncontracted, commercially available, financed, equipment secured, fuel secured, or physically deliverable to a particular load.

All data compiled by Tafel Power from public sources. Framing informed by the firm's transaction advisory work in ERCOT and cross-ISO markets.