Today is actually February 17, 2021. Somehow the 15th just slipped by without us noticing. Our apologies. Natural gas prices are at $3.23/MMBtu due mostly to the cold weather shutting down infrastructure. We expect prices to slide back under $3.00/MMBtu once Texas and Company get back to business as usual. Rig counts are at 397, up another 24 this month. Gas storage is creeping back down close the the five year average.

Dan Eberhart over at Forbes explains why the Biden presidency will not kill oil and gas production.

And here’s an article about Senator Joe Manchin, Democrat from West Virginia, and how he is going to affect energy policy.

The Brookings Institute published a brief analysis of the problems in Libya and how to stabilize the country. A stable Libya will produce lots of oil. The US would prefer prices low for consumers, but high for producers, so it’s hard to say what would be best economically. Of course, any normal human being will want an end to war, so hopefully the US will work aggressively toward ending this particular conflict.

Of course, there’s the fact that their infrastructure has been neglected during the civil war, so their production is going to be somewhat unpredictable until repairs and maintenance can be completed.

The Mountain Valley Pipeline has hit an unexpected regulatory hurdle. The FERC, the federal agency responsible for approving interstate pipelines, did not approve a necessary permit. The MVP has been moving along reasonably well, without the troubles that the Atlantic Coast Pipeline experienced. The MVP is at least partially complete, too. So not getting approval from FERC at this point may be a hint that there will be more issues in the future.

Michael Boyd at Seeking Alpha published a good article about how the federal land lease permit ban will affect the oil and gas companies working there.

This winter has been average to mild, and so it’s likely that the price of natural gas is going to stay around or below $3.00/MMBtu this year. (This was obviously written before the Big Cold).

We had been hearing for a while that there was plenty of pipeline capacity in the Appalachian Basin. That’s the main reason we weren’t too heartbroken when the Atlantic Coast Pipeline was cancelled. However, the smart folks over at RBNEnergy are saying that production has caught up with pipeline capacity.

The natural gas market is “tightening”, or in other words, supply and demand numbers are getting closer to each other. This means prices are going up.

In spite of the ban on new leases on Federal lands, new leases and permits are being issued.

OPEC+ is fighting about cuts in production, and may require Libya to curtail production.

A lawsuit has been filed alleging that banning oil and gas development on federal lands is actually illegal. They may have a valid argument.

The number of oil and gas well inspectors in West Virginia has always been woefully small. There is a movement afoot to fix that, but funding them is the issue. The solution proposed in this opinion piece of a $100/year/well fee would work fine for horizontally fracked Marcellus or Utica wells, but would make a lot of the old vertical wells unprofitable. In fact, a lot of the old vertical wells are used by regular, everyday West Virginians as a source of gas to heat their homes and water. If operators had to start paying this fee, they would plug the wells (which in itself costs tens of thousands of dollars) or sell them to the surface owners, who would have to pay the fee and get bonded with the state. Somebody has to pay for the well inspectors but this isn’t the best, or even really a good, solution.

Amazon has ordered a bunch of trucks that run on compressed natural gas.

This article about oil prices is titled, “Oil Price: Pundits’ forecasts as good as astrologers’ predictions“. That’s accurate.

One study shows that fracking activity has not led to significant economic improvement in most of the areas where it is taking place. While there hasn’t been an enormous increase in jobs in West Virginia counties, there has been significant money brought in through leases and bonuses, and taxes. Coal had a greater economic effect, as it took more people to mine coal than it takes to drill and produce from wells. The long-term effect was the same, though–as soon as the product was used up, the jobs moved away. West Virginia really needs to lean in to the industrialization side of natural gas or there will be little to show for it when the gas is used up.