Natural gas is at $3.12/MMBtu, up from a low of $2.84, but down from a high of $3.30.
Gas storage is at 3,567 Bcf, well below the 3,710 of last year, and just above the five-year average.
Drilling rigs are at 603, a significant jump up from 591 last month.
CNX donated money to some local fire departments and made some announcements while they did. They discussed the amount of royalties and severance taxes they’re paying out, the number of people they employ, and noted that the main constraint to additional development is the lack of pipelines to get product out of West Virginia.
On the other hand, PA, WV, and OH accounted for about 1/4 of the total U.S. production for the year.
Some data centers are looking at using steam-powered turbines to generate electricity. They aren’t as efficient as regular turbines, but would still work. So, if you can build a steam engine powered by natural gas you should have lots of business for the next few years.
Columbus, OH is getting 45 CNG buses.
The real root of the backlash against data centers is simply about change according to that article. I think it’s a little bit location specific. There are places where a data center could be done with little impact to the surrounding area, and others where the impact would be significant.
Here’s something you don’t see every day. Columbia Gas is shutting down some gas storage fields. Two of them underlie Marshall County, WV. It seems, from what we’ve read, that they were shut down in 1995 due to coal mining on the same acreage. Why they’ve chosen now to actually shut them down is unclear to us. However, it does explain why there’s a part of Marshall County that hasn’t been well developed for Marcellus shale yet. We expect to start seeing more leases and higher prices for Marshall County Marcellus shale in the future. Now, it’s going to take ten years to fully shut down, so we won’t see all of that get developed really quickly, but it’s coming!
Back in 2025 Shell’s Monaca, PA cracker plant exploded. Part of it did, anyways. The report is now final, and the DEP has fined Shell a little over $26,000. Damage from the explosion was about $95 million. The report states that there were 11 administrative controls that should have stopped the incident from progressing to an explosion, but something went wrong with each one. The report also makes recommendations for additional safeguards.
A West Virginia frac sand railroad terminal has been acquired by Twin Eagle Sand.
The Mountaineer Express Pipeline shut down because of a leak or an equipment failure, taking 1.8 MMBtus offline. That’s just under 2% of U.S. total daily production. The price of natural gas jumped. We could really use some more pipelines here.
One day later, and they’ve repaired the pipeline.
Here’s a report that says West Virginia’s water bills have doubled in the last ten years. It doesn’t go so far as to say that fracking has been the cause, but that seems to be a likely culprit. To put a little local, personal spin on it, I looked at my own water bills for this year and for 2015 and they really haven’t changed. I have been paying between $40 and $80 a month, depending on my usage. That’s just Upshur County, so perhaps other counties have gone up. Or maybe somebody’s playing with the statistics to get the result they want. Again. I honestly don’t know, but now you have two sides of the story.
West Virginia’s Attorney General, AJ McCuskey, is leading a coalition of 26 states which is backing the FERC’s proposed rule which will make it easier to update and expand existing pipelines. While this doesn’t make a clear path for a new pipeline, it’s improvement in an area that needs it.
The Trump Administration is proposing to scrap the super emitter program, a program that allows third parties using remote sensing tech to notify the EPA when there is a release of more than 100 kilos of methane. The program is currently not implemented, and implementation has been pushed back to January 2027. I doubt implementation would heavily affect Marcellus shale production, but it’s honestly hard to tell.
Cove Point LNG is back online, bumping up daily natural gas use a little bit.
There’s a case at the US Supreme Court that will determine whether pipeline companies calculate payment for interstate pipelines (federal eminent domain situations) based on State law or Federal law. At the State level, landowners can request reasonable attorney’s fees. At the Federal level, they can’t. Right now, there’s not a ruling in the Fourth Circuit (West Virginia’s jurisdiction) but there are rulings in other Circuits stating that State law should control. There won’t be a ruling until next summer, but it’s one to watch.