Natural gas is at $3.09/MMBtu, up from a low of $2.83 about two weeks ago, but down from a high of $3.23 three days ago.
Gas storage is at 1,848 Bcf, above the 1,707 of last year, but very close to the five-year average of 1,865.
Drilling rigs are at 553, up slightly from 551 last month.
Mon Power and Potomac Edison have announced a new 1,200 megawatt natural gas power plant in Monongalia County, WV, near the existing Fort Martin power plant.
Antero Resources has agreed to settle with the U.S. DOJ and the WV DEP over alleged violations of the Clean Air Act and West Virginia Air Pollution Control regulations. The settlement requires Antero to pay a $3.8 million penalty, as well as make improvements to 242 of their sites in West Virginia and Ohio.
Looks like we’re going to start measuring power plants in gigawatts, now. There’s going to be a 9.2 gigawatt (9,200 megawatt) power plant built up in Ohio. Most of the gas that goes to that plant will be Marcellus/Utica gas.
The coal industry is ramping up to oppose natural gas plants in West Virginia. I know we have a lot of coal here, but we also have a lot of natural gas. We shouldn’t be shipping it out of the state without turning it into something more valuable first, and natural gas power plants are a great way of doing that.
The West Virginia oil and gas industry responded to the coal industry.
The free market is responding to the natural gas turbine shortage, as the free market does.
West Virginians are pushing back against the recent push to build data centers.
The father of the Marcellus shale play, Bill Zagorski, talks about what they did to make the Marcellus a good formation to drill and produce from, and what technologies and techniques could come into play in the future.
GO-WV published a fact sheet about West Virginia’s oil and gas production, including that WV is the fifth largest natural gas producing state in the nation, and that the industry supports about 73,000 jobs in the state.
A U.S. LNG producer, Caturus Energy, inked a deal between its subsidiary, Commonwealth LNG and a Saudi Arabian company, Mercuria Energy Trading, to sell 1 Mtpa (million tonnes per annum) of LNG to Saudi Arabia every year for the next 20 years. This marks significant changes in the energy and geopolitical world.
A company named Quantum Pleasants has finished a one-year trial of a technology that uses coal or natural gas to create hydrogen. The Pleasants Power Plant is located east of Parkersburg up the Ohio River.
The U.S. has carried out military strikes against Iran. This will disrupt the flow of oil, and drive its price up, of course, as Iran produces about 4.3 million barrels of oil per day.
Iranian drone strikes on Qatar have forced the closure of Qatar’s LNG exports.
Hope Gas is going to build a $250 million pipeline over in Mason County, WV. While that’s certainly not an enormous project, it’s also not small. This is the same pipeline that we mentioned in last month’s article, which is going to a data center over on the river.
Hope Gas’ Morgantown Connector pipeline just started flowing gas.
Technologies used for drilling oil and gas wells could be used for geothermal wells.
About ten days into the Iran war, and oil prices have jumped. They are expected to steady, and then probably drop back down as the uncertainties of war become known quantities.
Natural gas turbine makers are ramping up production capacity, albeit cautiously.
Saudi Arabia is cutting oil production as their ability to move oil through the Straight of Hormuz is hampered.