NYMEX HH Natural Gas Price Flies by $8/MMBtu, Closes @ $7.82
New modern era records continue to be broken. The Henry Hub “front month” NYMEX futures price for natural gas briefly traded over $8/MMBtu yesterday before closing at $7.82/MMBtu (up $0.52 for the day). It certainly looks as if soon, possibly today, the NYMEX price will fly by and close at a price higher than $8/MMBtu. The rapid rise in price, now closing in on the highest in 14 years, is really quite breathtaking. However, some analysts are warning of a correction.
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In a court case that stretches back to 2019, Antero Resources, the biggest driller in West Virginia, challenged how its wells had been valued for tax purposes in Doddridge and Richie counties for 2016 and 2017. Antero said the combined value of its wells for those years should have been $1.488 billion. The state tax commissioner reckoned the value to be $1.513 billion. The controversy of well valuations not only for Antero but other drillers led to a reworking of how the state law values shale wells (see 
Spire STL is a 65-mile pipeline that connects to and flows Marcellus/Utica gas from the Rockies Express (REX) pipeline to residents and businesses in the St. Louis, MO area. The pipeline began flowing gas in late 2019 (see 
It appears the venerable number crunchers at the U.S. Energy Information Administration (EIA) bungled the monthly estimates they forecast quite badly in March, making a revision to the numbers for both the Marcellus/Utica and all seven tracked shale plays in yesterday’s April monthly Drilling Productivity Report. Last month EIA forecasted the M-U would produce 36.848 Bcf/d (billion cubic feet per day) of natural gas in April (see 
In the end, we didn’t think they would actually do it–but they did. The province of Quebec, Canada, with a huge supply of Utica Shale gas sitting beneath it, has just passed a new law outlawing all oil and natural gas production throughout the province. It is a breathtaking grab of totalitarian power. It’s also energy suicide. Quebec says it will pay a piddly $79.5 million (US) to expropriate the oil and gas drilling rights of companies owning those rights in the province. We’ve seen estimates that those rights are worth more than $5 billion. Questerre Energy, which owns more than 1 million acres of leases and an estimated 6 Tcf of Utica Shale reserves in the province, is considering its next legal move.
The Enverus rig count, as of last Wednesday, stood at 791, even with the same number from the week before. We are still near the highest number of rigs in operation since March 2020, the dawn of the pandemic. We are only 47 rigs away from the pre-pandemic high of 838 rigs. Last week the Marcellus had 41 rigs operating (same as the prior week), while the Utica operated 11 rigs (dropping two rigs), for a total of 52 active rigs in the M-U. Our chief rival, the Louisiana and Texas Haynesville, operated 69 rigs last week, dropping three rigs from the week before.
OTHER U.S. REGIONS: Permian gas production at risk by late 2023 as midstream capacity dwindles; Dark side of solar sales; NATIONAL: USA energy body lowers 2022 Brent oil price forecast.