Spotlight On: Michael Huwar, President, Peoples Natural Gas
May 2025 — As a key Northeastern market, the Pittsburgh region is actively working to improve the infrastructure to support its ongoing growth. When it comes to natural gas, Peoples Natural Gas and Essential Utilities are hard at work replacing aging infrastructure with new state-of-the-art facilities. In an interview with Invest:, Michael Huwar, president of Peoples Natural Gas, highlighted current and future plans to prepare the Steel City for the projected growth of new residents and business over the coming decades.
What separates the Pittsburgh market from the rest of Peoples’ operations?
The unique aspect of our region is that there is a tremendous amount of natural gas production in the same footprint that is served by Peoples. This footprint, an 18-county area that we serve, is vitally important because it helps keep costs down for our customers on an average basis. Our region trades at about a $1 discount per million cubic feet, compared to national averages. We in turn pass those savings on to our customers. This also allows People to invest into modernization efforts that help keep service safe and reliable while increasing the sustainability of our footprint and our system with minimal impact to the customers that we serve.
What have been some key highlights for Peoples Natural Gas in the past year?
Peoples and Essential Utilities have a continued focus on safety and reliability. Our No. 1 priority is the safety of our employees and the communities that we serve. More recently, we have had a strong focus on sustainability efforts, which entails opportunities to work with hydrogen and lower emission fuels. Additionally, we are piloting cutting-edge technology in metering with our Intelis Meter Program. This will provide added safety benefits to consumers, but it also allows the company to operate its systems more safely. This is a solid state device that will be game changing in the world of metrology in the natural gas business. We are evaluating this pilot program, but we have every indication at this point that this will be the type of technology that we want to move forward with across the entire footprint. We are excited about the safety features that this type of technology will present to our customers. We have a very robust modernization program. For 2025, we are aiming to replace 250 miles of our current gas pipeline and expect to build another 70-80 miles of gas pipelines to provide access to new customers.
What is the overall vision of the Peoples Natural Gas modernization program?
We serve more than 700,000 customers and operate 15,000 miles of facilities on a daily basis. Many of these facilities were installed many years ago and need to be replaced. The modernization program will target the facilities that need to be replaced while also targeting the addition of several miles of pipelines on a yearly basis. This will be related to economic development opportunities and the new businesses that are coming to the region. The Pittsburgh region is considered the home of energy. As a result, industries and businesses are coming to the area with the intent of utilizing natural gas for power generation, which will help support businesses like data centers and other developing technologies. It is vitally important for Peoples, as an infrastructure company, to have adequate facilities available. We need robust infrastructure that will help meet our current and future needs.
What are some efforts to promote sustainability and efficient use of energy?
The facilities that we build will replace aging infrastructure. The new pipelines will be tighter and produce less leakage. We have a targeted plan across the next decade to reduce our emissions from our 2019 baseline by 60% by 2035. This is a truly significant goal for Essential Utilities – through 2023, we have reduced emissions by approximately 25 percent, so we are making good progress to this goal.. We are also targeting decarbonization as an opportunity to expand sustainability and reduce emissions. We have several development projects such as a pilot with H Quest that focus on separating hydrogen from methane, but also focused on creating carbon black, which can be utilized in creating lower-carbon versions of many important industrial and commercial products. We are in partnership with the University of Pittsburgh to explore how our facilities will react to the introduction of hydrogen. We are focused on decarbonizing the systems that we operate but also looking at decarbonizing the product that we deliver to end users.
What workforce challenges is Peoples Natural Gas facing?
In the regions that we serve, we continue to be the preferred provider for the job opportunities that we have available. We leverage many partnerships. We work with the Energy Innovation Center Institute locally and do a lot of recruiting through that organization. Our objective is to ensure that our employees represent the areas and the communities that we serve. We feel that the labor pool in this region is very robust and also we place a lot of focus on employee development. The industry is growing and many people need development opportunities to gain experience and become quality employees for their organizations.
How do you balance affordability and the need for innovation?
In our region, our load factor is highest in the winter months. During this time, we are providing natural gas to our customers for their heating needs. Thinking about power generation and new businesses coming to the region, when you increase the load factor of the utility’s output, you are actually helping over time to reduce the rates to individual consumers. As we deliver more, the cost per unit will come down. This is why we are so focused on power-generating opportunities. When you think about the opportunities of serving those customers downstream from distribution facilities, this will be extremely helpful in keeping costs down for customers.
What are the top priorities moving forward?
Our main priority will always be the safe and reliable delivery of gas to our customers. We have a long-term plan as it relates to our modernization efforts to replace the aging pipe infrastructure with new state of the art lines. We will focus on providing development opportunities for our employees. We want to be good stewards in the region. This means controlling expenses and keeping service affordable while doing our part to leverage the energy advantages that our region has and attract investment to the region. This will help attract economic development opportunities and attract businesses that want to come to a place that has low-cost energy, a quality workforce, and a high quality of life. We want people to come and invest in our region.
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