A 1,700-megawatt gas plant in Saline Township and a project Tenaska now calls an “Energy Hub"
Tenaska's project page for its newly announced 1,700-megawatt natural gas plant in Saline Township, Jefferson County, Ohio, contains a project-timeline graphic. The graphic lists seven milestones, from “Local, State & Federal Permitting” through “CCS Site Closure & Monitoring” after 2064. In a caption at the bottom of the graphic, the company writes: "These are the earliest anticipated timelines; actual schedule will be aligned with customer timeline."
The same project site, on its Power Generation FAQ, states: "Tenaska has not finalized an offtake contract for this project, as these types of agreements typically come later in development."
Merchant generators do not typically align construction schedules to a customer's timeline; their schedules are governed by interconnection-queue position, capital availability, supply-chain lead times, and permitting. The grammar of the footnote describes a tied-customer build: a plant whose schedule is being shaped, before the offtake is finalized, by a counterparty whose own clock matters. Tenaska has not named that counterparty. The footnote and the FAQ, taken together, describe two project postures the company has not reconciled.
The announcement
Tenaska, a privately held Omaha-based energy developer, disclosed the project in person on Thursday, May 7, 2026, at a Jefferson County Commission meeting in Steubenville. An accompanying press release, datelined STEUBENVILLE, Ohio, May 7, was published on both the project's own website (tristateenergyhub.com) and Tenaska's corporate website (tenaska.com). The release adds the new gas plant to what had been, since November 2023, the federally funded Tri-State CCS Hub — a thirty-well carbon-sequestration project across Ohio, Pennsylvania, and West Virginia. The release rebrands the combined effort as the Tri-State Energy Hub. The project's news-archive page, with twenty-five entries dating to November 15, 2023, contains no mention of a power plant before May 7, 2026. Every prior entry concerns the CCS hub.
Tenaska's project map shades portions of six counties across three states under three named “Tri-State Energy Hub” sub-areas: BUCKEYE in Ohio (Jefferson, Carroll, and Harrison counties — with the announced gas plant in Jefferson); REDBUD in West Virginia (Hancock, opposite Jefferson; and Marshall, further south, opposite Belmont and Monroe — two non-contiguous counties separated by Brooke and Ohio counties, which are not part of the project); and OAK GROVE in Pennsylvania (Washington County). The May 7 release renamed what had been, since November 2023, the federally funded “Tri-State CCS Hub” into the “Tri-State Energy Hub” — adding generation, in name, to a project whose public materials had until that day described only carbon sequestration. The announced gas plant in Saline Township is, as of publication, the only generation facility Tenaska has named. Whether the company intends additional plants elsewhere within the announced footprint, the company has not said.
The plant, as described, is a 1,700-megawatt combined-cycle facility on 562 acres in Saline Township. Tenaska's own breakdown: 50 acres for the plant; 40 acres for the carbon-capture facility, if integrated; 472 acres of “buffer.” Earliest construction 2028; earliest power 2032 or 2033; CO₂ injection authorization 2033; integrated capture 2034; operational life through 2064. Average daily water use 12 to 15 million gallons, with discharge averaging 3 million gallons per day. Tenaska states it is “currently evaluating” both the water source and the discharge location. The pipeline gas source is described only as “the major natural gas pipelines already present in the area."
The customer question
Hyperscaler precedent for customer-aligned generation timelines is not hypothetical. Constellation announced the restart of Three Mile Island Unit 1 in September 2024 with Microsoft as the named offtaker. Talen Energy disclosed a 960-megawatt power-purchase arrangement with Amazon at the Susquehanna nuclear plant in March 2024. The OpenAI Stargate project, announced in early 2025, has involved coordinated generation builds by Crusoe, Oracle, and others. In each of these, a single hyperscaler — Microsoft, Amazon, an AI-compute partnership — drove a generation project's schedule. Customer-driven generation timelines at the 1,000-plus-megawatt scale are essentially exclusive to that pairing.
The Tri-State Energy Hub's project page does not describe a hyperscaler customer. It describes “the market need for natural gas generation” and notes growing demand “from reshoring of manufacturing, population growth, dater [sic] centers and other large power users” — the page contains a typographical error in the word “data centers.” The Power Generation FAQ states the company has not finalized an offtake contract. The project-timeline footnote presupposes a customer whose schedule already constrains the construction sequence.
The Development Docket submitted written questions to Tenaska in advance of this article's publication, asking the company to clarify the customer or customer category whose timeline the schedule is being aligned to, the status of any pre-contractual instruments with any prospective customer, the meaning of the May 7 rebranding from “Tri-State CCS Hub” to “Tri-State Energy Hub,” and whether the announced six-county footprint contemplates generation facilities beyond the announced Saline Township plant. As of publication, the company had not responded.
The land
The 562-acre parcel sits in Sections 17 and 23 of Saline Township, inland from the Ohio River. As of publication, it is held by MVOH Holdings LLC, a New Jersey limited liability company formed September 24, 2025 — roughly seven months before Tenaska's public announcement of the plant. MVOH is not, in any Tenaska disclosure or recorded filing reviewed by The Development Docket, identified as a Tenaska affiliate. The chain of title behind the parcel, and the documentary record of how Tenaska itself assembles land in eastern Ohio, will be the subject of the next installment.
What follows
This piece is the first of a series. The Development Docket is following the Tri-State Energy Hub through its permitting and construction lifecycle, beginning with the documentary record now and continuing through the Ohio Power Siting Board certification process, the federal Class VI injection-well authorizations at U.S. EPA Region 5 (Ohio) and Region 3 (Pennsylvania), the West Virginia Class VI program, the PJM Interconnection queue, and any subsequent corporate disclosures from Tenaska or its affiliates. Each piece in the series will carry a pre-publication clarification window for the company.
The place-based version of this story — what 1,700 megawatts means for a corner of the Ohio Valley still adjusting to the closure of the W.H. Sammis Plant three miles east — will follow this week at The Ohio Valley Digest.
The questions Tenaska has not yet answered — about its customer, about its land position, about its water supply, about the geography of what it now calls an “Energy Hub” — are documentary questions. They will not become any easier to answer as construction approaches in 2028. The Development Docket is following each.