Social

Economic and
Societal Impact

The size of a site dictates the amount of time needed to prepare and build a well, but construction takes a minimum of 120 days before drilling operations can begin. Before construction, our Land department engages with landowners near a planned site to discuss its location. Our Local Government and Community Affairs Specialists establish and maintain relationships with civic organizations, elected officials, emergency response personnel, business owners, residents, and other local stakeholders. These specialists work to understand and address our stakeholders’ primary concerns. This team also obtains approval for construction following local ordinances through township hearing boards, which guide operational practices in the applicable community. We provide monthly updates to elected officials at the county, state, and township levels. Anyone who wishes to receive updates can register for our monthly newsletters.

Once a well is brought online and the gas flows, our Local Government and Community Affairs team remains in contact with the applicable municipality and civic organizations, and our Owner Relations team becomes the primary point of contact for impacted landowners.

Access roads to sites can be near, or shared with, community neighborhoods, which can temporarily generate heavy traffic and operations near local residences — a regular safety concern in our local communities. When we design construction routes to sites, we carefully consider the locations of schools, recreation areas, and the local population. We curtail traffic on roads traveled by school buses, prohibit truck travel during school bus pick-up and drop-off, and place custom signs along our active truck routes to communicate these restrictions to our drivers and contractors. These signs also alert the community to slow down and watch for children. To make roads safer, we also widen roads, ensure the road base is suitable for heavy loads, build turnouts, and issue flaggers to help control traffic when necessary. To further mitigate our impact on local communities, we routinely complete road upgrades prior to starting operations, including roads at, and leading to, a site and we conduct proactive noise assessments. These efforts have led to a decrease in road issues, traffic, noise, complaints, and community disturbance.

We also implemented a communications process to provide information about upcoming operations and a means of receiving periodic updates from neighbors within a certain radius of construction. During the active operation of a site, we provide monthly updates to local townships and counties. Our Local Government and Community Affairs team actively engages with communities as needed and in alignment with local policies. In 2023, we hosted four separate community town halls — three in Pennsylvania (Greene County, Washington County, and Lycoming County) and one in West Virginia (Marshall County). In addition to providing operational updates to landowners and a formal space for question-and-answer sessions, these town halls offered an overview of EQT’s Unleash U.S. liquefied natural gas (LNG) initiative and provided updates about EQT’s philanthropic engagements in the local community.

We respond to and track community complaints and concerns reported via our Owner Relations hotline. Community members can easily contact our Owner Relations team members about any concerns they have through a dedicated email address, phone number, and submission form on our external website. We use a data-driven approach to resolve issues by completing assessments related to the concern (e.g., noise assessment) and collecting relevant data to find the best resolution. In 2023, we received 28,391 inquiries, with most questions about royalties or other payments. We fully resolved 97.5% of the inquiries received by our Owner Relations team during 2023 in the same calendar year.

Annually, we analyze our response results to identify trends in performance, benchmark against previous data, and determine any required procedural changes.

The safety of the communities where we operate, and that of our employee and contractor workforce, is a top priority for us. Our emergency management efforts focus on prevention, preparedness, and response. Our Crisis Management team, in conjunction with the Environmental, Health, and Safety (EHS) department, provides guidance and expertise in emergency response and crisis management. These functions also develop and maintain emergency notification procedures, training, and support.

Operating units develop site-specific emergency action and response plans to prepare for significant risks, and field teams lead daily tailgate safety meetings focused on hazard prevention and emergency preparedness before operations begin. Our Crisis Management team also conducts annual emergency scenario drills, and we contract with experts to provide immediate support in areas such as well control, firefighting, and spill response as needed.

To address and proactively respond to community safety concerns, we work closely with emergency response personnel, public works employees, elected officials, school districts, and other key community members to engage them in the process, provide information, learn from them, and build relationships. Most often, these conversations focus on the following:

• Identification of the activity at a local job site;
• The types of equipment used;
• The most appropriate response for various scenarios; and
• Our emergency or crisis response plan.

We work together with local first responders to provide training and site tours so that all parties have the knowledge needed to respond in the unlikely event of an emergency at our sites. First responders use our “Oil and Gas 101” handbook, which includes photos and descriptions for each phase of operations. We provide employee training on incident response and command structure approximately every six months. During on-location training, we conduct mock incidents for our employees and first responders to resolve. We also take part in the Southwest Pennsylvania Oil & Gas Emergency Management Alliance — a coalition of producers, supply companies, and first responders managed by Washington County Emergency Management Services and dedicated to promoting safety in the upstream industry.

We believe face-to-face interactions with landowners build trust and open channels for future dialogue. We routinely host in-person town halls in our core operating areas, which provide our Landowner Relations team the opportunity to address landowner concerns directly. We set up stations throughout the events to provide space for on-the-spot consultation.

In addition to creating opportunities for face-to-face interactions, we send frequent correspondence to landowners designed to keep these critical stakeholders informed and help them understand what to expect throughout the lifecycle of our operations in their area. We also send targeted correspondence to select landowners to provide updates on relevant projects.

Landowners can contact EQT via our hotline number (844-378-5263) or our dedicated webpage. Both avenues provide landowners an opportunity to easily voice concerns and ask questions. We promote the use of the hotline during in-person and virtual meetings, through email correspondence, on company business cards, and on our corporate website.

Our Owner Relations team manages all landowner requests and questions received via our secure online portal, telephone, or email by creating trackable cases in our digital work environment. Our formalized call center allows us to report more specific response time data. For entries made through our online portal, landowners select from a list of potential issues to automatically generate a corresponding tagged case in our digital work environment. The most frequent inquiry types include general royalty payment inquiries, account address changes, ownership changes, and direct deposit setup. For landowners who choose to contact us by phone, the caller can opt to leave a voicemail if all Owner Relations team members are on calls. The caller’s voicemail is automatically transcribed into a case in our digital work environment, which enables our Owner Relations agents to proactively follow up on concerns. We have also refined the data we collect for these cases to establish internal accountability and confirm that cases are routed appropriately.

The Local Government and Community Affairs team works alongside the Owner Relations team to respond to local concerns and regularly respond to issues raised by locally elected officials. The most frequent issues raised to the Local Government and Community Affairs team include road repair, area operations, and general constituent concerns.

Upon notification, our Vice President, Land, reports any significant landowner concerns directly to our Chief Executive Officer. The Board of Directors receives relevant updates on landowner relations on a regular basis. Our management team also reviews aggregate information on the types and volumes of inquiries we receive from landowners on a weekly basis.

Our process results in stronger relationships with members of the communities where we operate and better tracking of landowner feedback. We continually work to better understand the types of feedback we receive and proactively address any significant issues identified through this process. We manage all landowner communications internally to promote more direct relationships. We measure our performance in management of landowner concerns based on how frequently we cycle cases compared to our acceptable open case count. We strive to resolve issues identified by a landowner within seven business days of the notification date.

We must request certain personal information from landowners for legal and tax purposes. We strategically limit the number of employees who manage landowner data, and we work to protect landowner privacy by maintaining systems that manage incoming information and are designed to prevent breaches. All employees who oversee sensitive information are required to complete relevant training on properly safeguarding such information.

EQT is committed to our landowners, and we strive to operate with our values at the forefront of all that we do. For more information on Land Resources, visit our webpage.

Our operations, which are entirely in the United States, support local economies via taxes paid, road infrastructure improvements, local hiring of personnel and suppliers, and the use and support of local service establishments. In 2023, we spent over $1.8 billion with 1,520 suppliers. Of our total supplier spend, approximately 45% fell within our operational footprint while the remaining 55% went to suppliers outside our operating area.

We sustain local jobs for employees, contractors, and suppliers to support our daily operational activities. In addition to our direct employees, we supported approximately 16,700 ancillary jobs through our operations in 2023. This includes direct contractors — who make up most of our visible workforce — suppliers and supply chain employees who support our production, gathering and transmission activities. Employment contributions also include the earnings spent by those employees, contractors, and suppliers — or the induced impact — which drives employment in sectors that provide various goods and services to the communities where EQT and our contractors and suppliers operate and live.

Estimated U.S. Labor Impacts (number of jobs)

EQT seeks out small and diverse local suppliers^[5] whenever possible to deliver strong performance to our customers and communities through a sourcing approach supported by our Board of Directors and management team. Our team maintains dashboards in our digital work environment to track diverse service provider spend and identify targeted outreach opportunities. We integrate supplier diversity goals within our standard procurement practices to inform a wide-reaching, competitive, and data-driven approach to awarding business. We continue to expand our diverse supplier universe through targeting diverse suppliers in our bidding processes and setting goals for increased diverse supplier utilization.

Further, we encourage our top vendors to consider diverse subcontractors as it helps these businesses develop relevant experience and provides us with additional opportunities to work with diverse businesses that we may not otherwise have had the opportunity to engage. We conduct meetings with top vendors to provide supplier diversity education, outline reporting requirements for subcontracting with diverse suppliers, and identify specific products purchased by the top contractors to help align them with diverse firms that sell those products. We ask our top contractors to provide their monthly spend with diverse subcontractors and local suppliers and give greater consideration to vendors who identify how they will utilize diverse sub-vendors.

In 2023, we spent just over $106 million, or nearly 8% of our non-public company supplier spend, with diverse suppliers. We have awarded bids to diverse businesses in 120 supplier categories, up 6% from 2022.