The price of natural gas today is about $2.69/MMBtu.
Oil and gas news has again been a bit slow. Mainly it’s more of the same.
EQT is cutting its capital expenditures for 2020, and even the last quarter of 2019. Cutting them a lot. This means less drilling and less taking of leases.
West Virginia tax revenues are below what was initially projected, in part because of a lack of demand for gas and in part because the pipeline construction (ACP and MVP) got shut down.
Rig counts continue to fall. At some point this means underproduction, but for the time being we have plenty of gas. The important fact to figure out is when the reduction in rigs will result in too little gas. Somebody who can figure that out accurately can make a lot of money in the stock market.
This Forbes article focuses on oil, but the economic forces are true for gas producers as well. Everybody is slowing drilling. Everybody is saying they will produce the same. Eventually they will have to increase drilling as wells simply run out of gas. When? Who knows.
The Atlantic Coast Pipeline people think they’ll be building again in summer of 2020.
Disney Cruise Lines has ordered three LNG powered cruise ships. This will probably do more to reduce pollution than the Cash for Clunkers program did. Cruise ships are ridiculously dirty.
Cunningham Energy here in West Virginia is doing alright for itself. One of its well pads had produced (over its lifetime) 100,000 barrels of oil and 91 million cubic feet of wet gas. That doesn’t seem all that exciting until you realize that the wells they are drilling are about a tenth the cost of a Marcellus shale well. The ROI is pretty good.
A review of several weather sites says that 2019-2020 winter weather is expected to bring average temperatures or above average temperatures, but plenty of storms. Of course, there’s always a site or two that say it’s going to be colder than usual, and a site or two that say it’s going to be warmer than usual. Guess we’ll see, but it seems unlikely that we’ll have anything other than normal winter temperatures.
CNX is using e-fracking (using natural gas to power electric generators which provide the energy to push the fracking fluid into the formation), and went all e-fracking on a well pad in Green County, PA in May. It’s cheaper for the company, quieter by a lot, and produces fewer emissions.
Big news! Arsenal has filed for bankruptcy, again! They filed back in February of this year, zipped through the process in 10 days, and now are at it again. It seems this is more about restructuring debt than anything, as all the major investors are onboard.