NYMEX NatGas Price Loses $0.71 in 2 Days on Balmy Forecast
Although there are multiple (and complex) factors that work together to drive the price of natural gas up or down, there is one factor that typically stands head and shoulders above the rest: weather. Even though Europe is still in a pickle with lack of natgas supplies and bidding against Asia to attract said supplies from the U.S., and even though domestic demand from sectors like power generation and even home heating is on the increase, and even though domestic natgas in storage is way below the five-year average, all of which would normally indicate higher demand and therefore higher prices–the weather trumps everything. Warm weather predictions (meaning less demand) have caused a drop in the price of the NYMEX front month contract by 71 cents in the past two days. The price is now at a three-month low.
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The Pennsylvania Senate Environmental Resources and Energy Committee was busy yesterday. In a companion post today, we told you about opposition to a bill by Sen. Carolyn Comitta that would do nothing more than study the concept of exporting LNG from the Philadelphia region (see PA Sen. Carolyn Comitta, Anti from Philly, Confuses LNG and NGL). A second bill that Comitta and her pal on the Environmental Committee, Sen. Katie Muth (also a left-wing Democrat), opposed yesterday is a bill that withholds impact fee (tax) revenue from counties that ban fracking on or under public lands, like parks.
There are eight so-called Ivy League institutions: Brown University, Columbia University, Cornell University, Dartmouth College, Harvard University, the University of Pennsylvania, Princeton University, and Yale University. At this point, most of them have made moves to divest their massive endowments from any company that is even remotely connected to the fossil energy industry. One of them has not, yet: the University of Pennsylvania. A group of brainwashed children at UPenn are behaving like spoiled rotten brats, demanding UPenn divest from any company with a whiff of oil or natural gas about it. They even want the school to ban fossil energy companies from recruiting on campus (no free speech at UPenn).
Once upon a time, a few years ago, Europe turned its nose up to American “fracked” gas as filthy and vile, preferring to buy its gas from Vladimir Putin instead. American companies fell all over themselves to win the love of arrogant Europeans for our natural gas–primarily by “proving” our gas (turned into LNG) is “responsible.” Responsible gas certification programs appeared overnight and have been adopted by most (if not all) of the major drillers in the Marcellus/Utica (see 
We spotted a must-read article from Scott Tinker, the director of the Bureau of Economic Geology at The University of Texas at Austin. In his column, Tinker points out the failure of Europe’s energy policies for the past quarter century–policies that shut down energy options like nuclear, coal, and natural gas, believing that wind and solar would take their place. It hasn’t worked. The brilliance of Tinker’s column is in comparing what’s happening in states like California and New York to what happened in Europe. Those two states (among others) are following in the footsteps of Europe, doing the same things–eliminating energy choice before alternatives can handle the load. And we are seeing the same identical results in CA and NY that we see in Europe–energy scarcity and skyrocketing energy prices.
MARCELLUS/UTICA REGION: ‘Intro To Natural Gas’ popular among Tech students; INTERNATIONAL: EU ramps up Russian LNG purchases by 50% this year; Video shows massive hole in Nord Stream natural gas pipeline.