So, we’re publishing a late for this period. We’ve had some personal things to take care of that limited the time we could spend on this. Hope you’ll forgive.

Gas prices were at $2.29/MMBtu on October 1.

China’s gas demand is growing leaps and bounds. Analysts doubt it will be able to produce enough to keep up with growth. That gas has to come from somewhere.

India and China are trying to put together an agreement to work together when buying oil. India is also trying to get South Korea and Japan involved.

FERC has approved Elba Island’s first LNG train. There are nine more to come in the next year or so.

Holy Moley! The United Stage Geological Survey (USGS) has released a new estimate for recoverable natural gas from the Utica and Marcellus shale formations. Just for perspective, the estimate for about 15 years ago was about 2 trillion cubic feet of gas. Then it went up to 84 trillion, then 97 trillion. Now ….. drum roll ….. 214 trillion! That’s a lot of gas. I mean, the USGS is a conservative organization and is probably making calculations based off current natural gas prices, so this shows that producers are figuring out how to get more gas out of the rock. We’re not running out of natural gas any time soon.

Here’s an article that briefly goes into how U.S. LNG is competing with foreign LNG.

The drone attack on Saudi oil refining did not have a strong impact on oil prices, but the long-term implications towards stability are surprising.

There’s some talk of extending I-68 to run west of Morgantown. That’s some rugged country out there. I’d be curious to see where the route would go.

OPEC would like to have all of the oil producing countries in the world join with it.

A nice, concise article from RBN Energy describes how the fundamentals of natural gas are affecting the price of natural gas.

Every once in a while something bad happens in the oil patch. Honestly, we probably don’t hear about most of them. This one made headlines. There’s a gas well up in PA that caught fire. Local firefighters were able to put it out in about four hours.

Virginia has forced the Mountain Valley Pipeline to pay a $2.15 million dollar fine and submit to additional oversight during construction.

In related news, some permits the MVP needs have been pulled.

Research has turned up a new method for determining how much gas is in a formation and possibly which formations may produce gas. It’s cheaper and better, so companies will likely adopt it pretty quickly.

Gas prices ended at about $2.32/MMBtu on October 15, 2019. This post is published on October 20, so I haven’t scraped the exact data on the date.

Today, gas prices are at $2.68/MMBtu, which we absolutely would not have predicted two weeks ago. Oil prices jumped over the weekend when a military strike on Saudi oil production took a bunch of it offline, but prices have dropped back below $60/bbl already.

West Virginia is creating a task force to bring downstream oil and gas industries to West Virginia. Downstream means after the gas has come out of the ground. We have all the upstream jobs we need here, and they’re pretty hard to keep beyond a certain point because when oil and gas drilling slows down the jobs disappear. But downstream jobs would be more consistent; cracker plants, energy plants, and others, just can’t shut down and restart when the economy slows down. This should be a good thing for West Virginia. We’ll see how it goes. It wouldn’t be the first good news we’ve seen for WV that just kind of….fizzled.

Whew! Talk about contrarian thinking. Pretty much everybody thinks that the price of gas is going to be down (think below $2.50/MMBtu) for a long time still. But an article over at OilPrice.com by Dwayne Purvis makes the argument that while we can produce a heck of a lot of gas awfully quickly, demand is outgrowing production, production is slowing down, and storage hasn’t grown enough to keep up with demand. That’s a brave argument to make, but it’s worth taking a close look at. We wouldn’t mind too much if he was right, because the increase in activity in West Virginia would be good for our business.

Cunningham Energy occasionally makes the news with a new move to develop oil from formations that previously made West Virginia mineral owners very rich. Cunningham uses horizontal fracking in formations like the Big Injun, the Weir, and the Berea to recover oil that is not otherwise economic to develop. It’s a pretty good plan and we’re frankly a bit surprised that other companies haven’t glommed on to the idea yet. Cunningham has moved into Gilmer and Roane Counties, having acquired 12,000 acres worth of already producing property under the Rock Creek oilfield and the Tanner oilfield. Keep your eyes on these guys.

Southwestern Energy is just about the only company working in the northern panhandle of West Virginia right now, mainly because SWN bought up all of Chesapeake’s holdings up there, and CHK had bought leases on pretty much everything up there at one point. The northern panhandle is a little different as most of it is more densely populated than the rest of the state. Residents of the area are complaining about noise and other nuisances of the drilling and fracking process. SWN and the county are gathering info and making decisions. Gotta love how quickly government works. Unfortunately, the county probably doesn’t have much it can do to force SWN to do anything. Noise ordinances aren’t usually written with this kind of thing in mind, and drilling permits are done through the state. Maybe there’s a construction permit that can be amended or modified, but getting oil and gas companies to play nice and be good neighbors after you’ve signed an oil and gas lease is usually a losing battle.

China is the largest growth market for natural gas right now. Chinese growth is expected to slow some, and the US-China trade war has decreased the amount of gas the US exports there, but that will end sometime and the numbers will go up. Interesting fact from the article, China’s gas import demand is second only to…Japan. Think on that for a second.

Oil and gas producers are constantly working to be more efficient. They are producing more gas with fewer rigs. Trying to gauge the health of the industry by the number of operating rigs is not as accurate as it used to be.

Toby Rice, the new CEO of EQT, is working to get on my good side. Well, he doesn’t know me from Adam, but he’s making moves that make me and West Virginia mineral and royalty owners happy. The latest move is to dismiss a lawsuit that challenged one of the West Virginia legislature’s new laws. That law made it so that producers could not deduct post-production costs from certain old leases. It was good law for mineral and royalty owners. Thanks, Toby, for removing this legal challenge.

Some producers are using flared gas to run frack pumps. It’s called electric fracking or e-fracking because the natural gas turns an electric generator which turns the water pumps. Excellent use of an otherwise waste product.

Saudi Arabia has a new Energy Minister, and oil prices bumped up because of it.

One fellow thinks that the price of oil is going to go up in the near future because US production is set to go down a bit. It’s an interesting argument, extrapolating from data that shows that US production has leveled off in the last few months.

Mexico buys a hedge on its oil production each year to protect its budget from serious fluctuations in oil prices. This year it sounds like they’re hedging at $49/bbl, down from $55/bbl last year.

EQT is going to layoff 200 of its 850 workers in the next week. Ouch.

And on Friday we have news that EQT has, in deed, laid off 196 workers.

Probably everybody heard, but here it is anyways. Houthi rebels blew up part of Saudi Arabia’s oil production. It took about 5% of the world’s oil supply offline. The Saudis said they would have production almost entirely restored by Monday, and they pretty much did. Oil prices today (Tuesdays) have dropped almost as precipitously as they jumped.

Natural gas production has broken records again in August in spite of low natural gas prices. The more interesting take on this, though, is that we still haven’t gotten back to our five year average in gas storage. That means demand is growing as well. I think we’ll see gas storage levels drop like crazy again this winter, if the winter is at all bad.

Speaking of demand, Longview Power operates a 710 MW coal-fired power plant just north of Morgantown, WV on the Monongahela River. They have announced that they are going to build a 1,200 MW gas-fired power plant at the same location.

An interesting analysis of the current state of oil and gas by Financial Times.  Essentially, lots of people thought that oil prices would stay lower for longer, and the recent jump up over $70/bbl has encouraged a lot of people to think that lower for longer is over.  The article argues that the price of oil will drop again when OPEC starts to open up the spigots again, and explains why they will again in the near future.  It’s that explanation that is worth the read.

Also in the news today, Saudi Arabia has increased oil output by 162,000 barrels per day in May.  That puts them within 28,000 bbl/day of their agreed cap.  With oil prices over $70/bbl, and the oversupply just about gone, it makes sense for them to start producing a little more.

There’s a rumor out there that the Parkersburg cracker plant is back on.  The article was in the Pittsburgh Business Times which requires a subscription.

With new pipelines coming online in the Marcellus/Utica region, one would expect that total production from the region would increase.  It hasn’t.  The Mountain Valley Pipeline and the Atlantic Coast Pipeline might not end up running at anywhere close to full capacity when they are completed because producers are apparently not drilling enough wells to fill what we already have.

I ran across this article from about 2014 that gave a quick overview of most of the big players in the West Virginia Marcellus/Utica area at the time. It’s fascinating to read what people were saying just four years ago and think about what has happened since.

Mountain Valley Pipeline has been issued another violation notice in regards to environmental standards.

This article from Forbes suggests that oil prices will stay up for the next six months.  The arguments is that demand has grown, Saudi Arabia won’t increase production, Iran won’t be allowed to increase production by the U.S., the rest of OPEC can’t increase production and may even decrease production, and the U.S. can’t increase production quite fast enough.  It’s an interesting thought for sure.

This article, also from Forbes, goes into a little more detail as to why U.S. producers can’t increase production fast enough.

Kallanish Energy summarized the Energy Information Administration’s “Short-Term Energy Outlook”.  Energy production from gas will go up about 2% in the next two years, from coal will go down about 2%, from renewables will go up about 1%, and from nuclear will go down 1%.  They’re not big changes, but they fit the overall trend of the last few years.

Another article from Kallanish Energy discusses where the money for a natural gas liquids storage hub in the Marcellus/Utica region will come from, and what it takes to get that money.

A lot has happened over the last few months, with oil prices rising and gas prices falling.  Some highlights follow.

West Virginia has entered into a Memorandum of Understanding with China Energy, the first step in creating a government/business relationship.  The goal of the relationship will be to develop natural gas downstream facilities in West Virginia.  This is great news for West Virginia.

Oil prices climbed above $60/bbl and pretty much stayed there, thanks to OPEC and Russia extending their policy of keeping production limited.

Cotenancy has passed the West Virginia legislature.  The highlights of the legislation are that if 75% of the owners of a given tract sign a lease, the other 25% can be forced into a lease at the best terms that the other owners signed up at.  There are more details and we’ll get to that in another post another day.

Renewables are not pushing oil, gas, and coal out of the marketplace.  The data and the article are from last year, but the trends are long-term so the article is still worth reading.

Tree-sitters have effectively pushed back the timeline for the Mountain Valley Pipeline to be built.  It will be interesting to see how long this tree-sitting continues.

It’s August 18, 2017.  Gas prices are at about $2.90/MMBtu, and oil prices are at about $47/bbl.

Earlier this week a Libyan oil terminal was closed by local protesters.  If the protest is lengthy, it could affect oil prices.

Hurricane Harvey has wreaked havoc in south Texas, including Houston, one of the oil and gas capitols of the world.  Destruction has shut down refineries and raw production, with the net effect on the oil and gas industry still undetermined.  While one would think that the price of oil would rise considerably, it has not.  Fracking should be able to provide the raw materials, and there has been a glut of gasoline for most of this year.  The price of gasoline has gone up some, and will probably continue to do so.  But the price of oil seems like it will remain steady.  It could even go down some if it takes a long time to get the refineries back online.

Libya never ceases to produce news about oil and gas.  This time the Libyan navy seized a tanker because they suspect the tanker was smuggling oil.

Nuclear energy is on the decline, with yet another nuclear power plant being put to rest.

I just happened to speak with a lawyer from Dallas today.  He said that some of the gas stations in Dallas have run out of gas.  That should only be a temporary problem, as the U.S. has had a glut of gasoline for most of the year.  We got a little low just before August, but that encouraged European suppliers to send plenty our way.  Of course, the trick is getting it from the Northeast to Houston.

It’s likely that we are at the beginning of a new oil “supercycle”.  This article in Arab News discusses the last two, the possible new one, and makes some suggestions for how OPEC should apprach the new supercycle reality.

Here’s your daily dose of contrarian thinking.  Everybody thinks that electric vehicles are going to be oil and gas killers in the near future, but someone did a back-of-the-napkin calculation and the numbers show that ten years from now EVs are going to only need about 0.76 Bcf/d of natural gas to produce the electricity necessary to power them.  To put that number into perspective, two new pipelines proposed for this area, the Mountain Valley Pipeline and the Atlantic Coast Pipeline, will each move 1.5 Bcf/d, and the under-construction Rover Pipeline will move 3.25 Bcf/d.  The U.S. currently burns a little over 72 Bcf/d, and is expected to burn a little over 75 Bcf/d in 2018.  So under 1 Bcf/d is not that much in the grand scheme of things.  Of course, demand for EVs could really take off, or it could not.  Guess we’ll see.

Probably the best summary of how the oil and gas industry has been affected by Hurricane Harvey can be found in this article at RBN Energy.

Libya’s crude production has dropped 30% because militants have blocked pipelines.

September 1, 2017: Oil prices are at about $47/bbl and gas prices are at just over $3/MMBtu.  Also, the price of gasoline here in Buckhannon has gone from $2.29 to $2.55/gallon since Hurricane Harvey hit, an increase of 26 cents.

OPEC requested that Libya and Nigeria present data regarding their oil production at the meeting on July 24.  It’s presumed that OPEC is planning to limit their production now the they are producing more.

Wall Street is financing big oil, but it might be giving too much money to the industry.  More money equals more production equals more supply equals lower prices.

If you’d like to read about the Strategic Petroleum Reserve and its effects on the market, this is the article for you.

Venezuela owns almost 50% of Citgo, a Texas-based oil and gas company.  Venezuela owes Russia $1.5 billion dollars, collateralized by that ownership.  Venezuela is very likely to default on that loan to Russia, in which case Russia would end up owning almost 50% of Citgo.

Lots of people think that electric cars are likely to replace gas cars, and that consequently the demand for oil will go down.  That’s not the way things have happened in Norway.  It’s still early in the process, but it’s interesting to see that “what people think” isn’t necessarily what will happen.

OPEC is overproducing.  A lot of it is from Libya and Nigeria, but some of it is from Saudi Arabia itself.

Coal is expected to produce more energy in 2017 than natural gas, but natural gas will produce more in 2018.

Halliburton says that drilling will not grow much in 2018 because the service sector can’t provide enough services.

July 18, and there’s a rumor that an oil field in Saudi Arabia that produces 900,000 bpd may have some technical problems that could severely limit or entirely shut down its production in the next few weeks.  If that happened, oil prices would skyrocket.  Some investors are already getting in on the action, with oil prices jumping $.40/bbl today so far.  It’s amazing how things can change so fast in the oil patch.  Just yesterday we were thinking that oil and gas prices would probably be stable through the rest of this year.

A Bloomberg article attempts to predict the future, which is always difficult but perhaps even more so when it’s the future of oil and gas you’re attempting to predict.  Natural gas has been thought of as a bridge fuel between oil and renewables.  The article says that the transition period is going to be much shorter than previously thought.  The one thing we think the article didn’t take into account is the fact that as the demand for gas goes down because the price of renewables is going down, the price of gas will also go down.  We’ve seen the industry adapt to low prices.  We’ve seen that this year coal will produce more electricity than gas because the price of coal went down.  This may or may not be the last year that happens.  It’s a fluctuating market and gas will be around longer than environmentalists want to believe, but not as long as oil and gas industry people want to believe.

Mark Zuckerberg, the founder of Facebook, went fracking.  Lots of people think he’s prepping for a Presidential run.

There are twice as many rigs running today than there were this time last year.

Consequently, the price of drilling has gone up about 8%, after declining 34% since March of 2014.

Congress has passed legislation aimed at speeding up the permitting process for interstate and international pipelines.

U.S. News published an article that’s essentially an overview of the need and the safety record of major interstate pipelines.  That still doesn’t make me very comfortable with the idea of living about 1000 feet from a 42-inch high-pressure gas pipeline.

The House Committee on Science, Space and Technology thinks that Russia is funding environmentalist efforts that oppose fracking in the United States.  That would be a wise financial investment for Russia.

Kevin DiGregori hints that there are lots of down-stream projects in the works in West Virginia.  That would be really good for West Virginia’s economy.  Maybe we’ll finally stop shipping our raw natural resources out of the state for other states to turn into greater value products.

Fracking is changing world politics.

Gas and oil production numbers in the U.S. are both increasing.

It’s August 18, 2017 and gas prices are still below $3.00/MMBtu.  As we get close to the end of injection season it will be interesting to see how close we get to filling up our storage facilities again.  If we end up with less in storage than last year we can expect slightly higher prices than last year.  Slightly less is the trend so far this year.

Oil is at about $47/bbl.

I’ve been on vacation and catching up from being on vacation, so this edition is both late and not complete.  Here’s looking forward to the next regularly scheduled edition.

There was a public hearing about the natural gas fired power plant that is proposed for Harrison County, WV.  The projected operation date is sometime in July, 2020.  This would be a good thing for West Virginia royalty owners, and West Virginians as a whole.  Instead of shipping all our gas out of state as a raw material, we can add value here and then ship it out at a higher price.

South Jersey residents will see a reduction in their power bills, in part because of the low cost of Marcellus Shale gas.

The Wall Street Journal is saying that natural gas is finally a global market.  I don’t agree that’s true quite yet, but I think we’re awfully close.

The U.S. is the worlds top producer of petroleum and natural gas, and has been for five years straight.

Mexico is buying up a lot of U.S. natural gas.  Exports to Mexico have quadrupled in recent years.

Volvo is making a push towards building more electric vehicles.  All new models from 2019 on will be either full electric or hybrid.

Shale drillers in Pennsylvania have drilled twice as many wells in the first half of this year as they did in the first half of last year.

Saudi Arabia is warning that there’s not enough investment in oil drilling, and that in the next five years we’re going to see a serious drop in production.  Seems that would be in their best interest, and American shale producers should be licking their chops if that’s really the case.

The cracker plant in Ohio is coming a little closer to reality.  A final decision has not been made, but PTT Global Chemical announced the purchase of land for about $130 million.

Rig counts in the Marcellus-Utica region remain steady after a slow but steady increase in the last few months.

Watching how the oil and gas supply industry is going is a pretty good way of knowing how the oil and gas industry is going.  Recently, suppliers of frac sand have taken a hit by investors, meaning there’s not confidence that demand for frac sand will grow.  That said, demand is up considerably year over year already, so the industry isn’t doing poorly.

China’s national gas developer plans to double natural gas production in the next three years.

The Trump administration has appointed some new commissioners for the FERC, but they have not been approved.  The CEOs of some major pipeline companies are saying that if they aren’t approved by August the investment money for those projects may disappear.

Now that Nigeria and Libya are back to producing large amounts of oil, OPEC is going to force them to curtail their production.

President Trump stumped in Europe for U.S. natural gas.

CNN Money doesn’t think gas powered cars are going away any time soon, in spite of Volvo’s move to electric.

France won’t be developing oil and gas any more.  American fracking companies are happy.

Investors are hesitant to throw more money at the oil and gas industry right now.  That’s good for the time being.  We don’t need more development at the moment.  More investment will be needed when prices start to climb towards $4.00/MMBtu.  That may be a while.

July 17, and gas prices have moved a lot in the last month but they’re back at about $3.00/MMBtu.  Oil prices are at $46/bbl, but have been moving around a lot as well.

Currently, it seems that energy prices are going to be relatively stable for some time.  Natural gas production is about right to put us at about the right amount of gas storage before winter, so we’ll see the usual bump in price this winter.  Oil prices could nosedive if OPEC decided to open the spigots but they appear to be committed to keeping prices up until at least the IPO for Saudi Aramco, and American fracking is not yet producing enough oil to drive prices down.

The price of oil and natural gas have taken hits in the last few weeks.  Oil is down below $45/bbl and natural gas is hanging out around $3.00/MMBtu.  It’ll be interesting to see where things go as the summer progresses.

This article at Energyfuse.org suggests that shale drilling is hitting a ceiling as far as productivity per well is concerned.

Some drillers are ready to slow down activity if prices continue to decline.

Wind and solar electricity generation exceeded 10% of U.S. total for the first time in March, according to the EIA.  We expect that growth trend to continue for the next few years at least.  It seems that renewable power generation has reached a critical mass of sorts, and will continue to grow regardless of the price of fossil fuels.

Russia believes that oil markets will rebalance by the time the current OPEC/Russia production cut agreement is over.

OPEC says rebalancing is happening slower than expected.

Fracking technology has improved significantly over the last few years.  Companies are getting more product from each foot of lateral than they used to.  Now they are going back and using current techniques on older wells and getting increased production.  It’s called refracking, and it’s going to add significant supply at very little additional cost in the way of money, time, and environmental impact.

One reason oil prices are declining is that Libya and Nigeria have begun producing more oil.  They are excluded from the OPEC/Russia production cut agreement because their production has been tiny due to civil war.

West Virginia Senator Capito has introduced a bill that would expedite permitting for a gas storage hub, and Senators Capito and Manchin have introduced a bill that would make it possible for West Virginia to get a loan guarantee from the federal government for the project.

Whew!  Five days later than usual.  I’ll stick with the “business is booming” story for now.

Libya says it has exceeded 800,000 barrels of oil per day recently, with the possibility of hitting 1MM in the near future if they can get some contractual issues ironed out.

The EIA expects the U.S. to produce more gas this year than it previously thought.

A new study suggests that re-fracking can bring so much new production online from an old well that it’s just like drilling a new well.  It doesn’t mention whether re-fracking makes it possible to extract gas that otherwise would remain trapped in the formation, or just speeds up the extraction of gas that would come out anyways.

Sabine Pass continues to increase exports of LNGs.  The plant took in 2.3 Bcf per day in the second week of May, up from 2.1 Bcf per day in the first week.

A recent trade deal will make it possible for the U.S. to export LNGs to China.  Nice.

Some think that OPEC can’t just extend their production cuts, they need to double down on them.  There’s no other way to chew through the surplus.

Mexico has been increasing its reliance on natural gas.  Interestingly, it has a shockingly small number or drilling rigs running.  Good for the U.S., weirdly bad for Mexico.

This article discusses what OPEC is trying to accomplish by cutting production.  It’s pretty interesting, but even more interesting is the fact provided in the article that U.S. oil production is expected to hit 9.3 million barrels per day this year, and 10 million barrels per day next year.  That’s a lot of new production, and all thanks to OPEC and Russia cutting production.  They’re playing a dangerous game, and at some point they’ll probably have to start producing at full speed or they’ll just create a behemoth in the U.S.

This article goes into just how much money OPEC has “lost” since their announcement in November of 2014 that they would flood the market with cheap oil.  It also briefly mentions that Saudi Arabia has explored using fracking in its own oil fields, with little success.

There aren’t enough frack crews.  This was one of the factors that I thought might slow down the growth of the oil and gas industry when the price of oil and gas started to recover.

On top of that, somebody crunched the numbers and decided that the Marcellus/Utica region needs an additional 45 drilling rigs (and corresponding frack crews, of course) to fill the new pipelines that are going to be completed in this area.  There are only about 50 rigs running in this area right now.  There used to be a lot more than those two number combined, back in the boom before 2014, so if the crews could be found the rigs could be run and the gas produced.

Both oil and gas prices are down again.  Oil is down in spite of OPEC and Russia extending the production cuts for another nine months.  This article says the extension is going to have the desired effect and oil prices will go higher again.

Natural gas prices have gone down in part because some power producers are switching back to coal.  This leads me to think that we’ll probably be pushing the limits of natural gas storage at the end of injection season this year, just like last year, with the associated low price of natural gas.

Marcellus drillers aren’t drilling a lot of new wells compared to other oil or natural gas plays.  They’re completing DUCs.  There’s a lot of drilling that needs to be done in the near future, and they’ll have to bring on some new rigs soon.

The EPA issued a report last year that said the natural gas industry was leaking methane (natural gas) like crazy.  However, it was based off spreadsheets, algorithms, and estimates.  This year, the EPA has done a field test and found that last year’s report overestimated methane leakage by 97%.  Think about that for a minute.  Now, it’s just one test, and science needs to be repeatable to be reliable.  But when the numbers are that different it’s extremely likely that last year’s report is wildly incorrect.

It’s been quite a while since anything has been said about the possible cracker plant in Parkersburg, WV.  The Parkersburg News and Sentinel has a very short editorial which we link to here because we’d like to see more people talking about it.  A cracker plant would help West Virginia avoid the problem that it’s had for over 150 years of pulling natural resources out of the ground and shipping them out of the State as raw materials.

The price of oil has taken a real dip lately, today’s bump up in price notwithstanding.  The reason for that dip?  American frackers have been ramping up production like mad.

Rig counts dropped by one each in West Virginia and Pennsyvlania in the first week of May.  Hopefully that means drillers are slowing down a bit on purpose, which means they think that we’re producing as much gas as we can get out of the region and into storage for this year.  That’s healthy, smart thinking, if it’s on purpose.  If.

We’re on course to put record amounts of gas into storage again this year.  If you’ll remember, we did this same dance last year.  In the end, producers cut back and we ended up with less storage (still record highs) than what most experts predicted.  I imagine the same thing will happen this year.

Saudi Arabia is saying it will do whatever it takes to rebalance the oil market.  There’s dancing in the streets in Texas.

OPEC has been reduced to begging–begging American frackers to slow down production, that is.  If there was any question left as to who controls oil’s top end, it has been settled.

OPEC and Russia have reached a deal to extend the production cuts they agreed to six months ago.  Oil prices are pushing $50/bbl again for the first time in almost a month.

The FERC has a new date for review of the Atlantic Coast Pipeline EIS.  The final EIS will be made available on July 21, 2017.  After that, there will be 90 days for other federal agencies to make comments on the project.  The final approval will be on October 19, 2017.