Price of NatGas Doubles in NEPA – Thanks to Atlantic Sunrise Pipe
The evidence continues to pour in that the addition of Williams’ Atlantic Sunrise Pipeline, a 200-mile greenfield pipeline from northeastern to southeastern PA where it joins the Transco Pipeline, is having a dramatic and ongoing effect on natural gas prices in northeastern PA. As in, the price drillers get for their gas has doubled. Atlantic Sunrise went online in early October (see FERC Approves Atlantic Sunrise for Startup! Pipe Opens Sat. Oct. 6). The main shipper on Atlantic Sunrise is Cabot Oil & Gas. But Cabot isn’t the only shipper, and not the only beneficiary, of higher prices. Seneca Resources and Range Resources are also shipping gas on Atlantic Sunrise, and reaping the price benefits.
Read More “Price of NatGas Doubles in NEPA – Thanks to Atlantic Sunrise Pipe”
This one will make your head explode. We’ve been warning about this for some time, or rather, RBN Energy has been warning about it (and we’ve brought you their warnings). During a recent three hour period of natural gas trading at the Waha Hub (in West Texas), the price of gas went to negative 1 cent per thousand cubic feet (Mcf). You read that right. Someone was paying someone else to buy the gas from them! Why? Too much “associated gas” being produced in the prolific Permian Basin, and not enough pipelines to carry it to other markets. The Permian is all about oil drilling. Natural gas is a byproduct, to the point it may be worth giving it away for free just to get rid of it so a driller can keep pumping oil. The proliferation of natgas in the region is driving prices into the subbasement.
This is an “I told you so” post. Last Wednesday, just ahead of what was perhaps the coldest temps for Thanksgiving on record in New England, the price of electricity and the price of natural gas both spiked in New England. Most electricity produced in the region is produced by burning natural gas. Natgas was selling for $13.70/Mcf (thousand cubic feet, or million BTUs) last Wednesday. That was up from an average of $4.67/Mcf this year (up almost 300%). The reason for the spike is lack of natural gas, and the reason for lack of natural gas is a lack of pipelines, plain and simple. And this won’t be the last time. New England will get hosed this winter as prices rocket every time there’s a cold snap. We take no pleasure in saying, “Told you so.”
We’re not going to continue to cover news about the price of natural gas each day, because the price goes up, then it goes down, then it goes back up…you get the idea. We will, however, bring you one more story today on the price of natgas, because of the ongoing wild swings in price. The fact that prices goes up and down is not mysterious and frankly, not noteworthy. What is noteworthy is the sudden and dramatic swings–called volatility in the business. Last Wednesday the NYMEX futures price for gas hit a four-year high, up 18% in a single day (see 
Yesterday MDN brought you the news that the price of the NYMEX natural gas futures contract closed (on Wednesday) at a four-year high, up 18% (see 
Since our lead story today is about the spike up in the price of natural gas (see Price of NatGas Spikes to Highest Level in 4 Years – $4.84/Mcf), we thought it fitting to bring you a related story that caught our eye–on the price of natgas in Pennsylvania. For years PA, especially the dry gas northeast, has been plagued with some of the lowest natural gas prices in the U.S. Why? Prolific production and not enough pipelines to get all that production to higher-paying markets. The situation is changing, rapidly. Prices in the northeast Marcellus are catching up with the Henry Hub price in southern Louisiana, thanks to multiple pipelines coming online. What does it all mean for Pennsylvanians?
More than four years ago MDN posed the question, could an alternate trading hub like Dominion South in Pennsylvania ever replace the venerable Henry Hub trading hub in Louisiana as the world benchmark (see 
“Come on Jim, quit writing so much about pipelines! Write more about upstream/drilling!” We have had MDN subscribers tell us that (no lie). But here’s the thing: What happens with pipelines *directly* affects what happens with drilling–the willingness of companies to drill more. Case in point: Over the past few weeks two new pipelines have come online: Williams’ Atlantic Sunrise and DTE Energy’s NEXUS. More capacity along Energy Transfer’s recently completed Rover also recently came online. The effect of the three combined has been dramatic. Production volumes have shot up another 1 Bcf (billion cubic feet) in the past month, to over 30 Bcf/d. And get this: While the Appalachian spot price for gas was $1/Mcf (thousand cubic feet) on Oct. 8 ($2 *below* the Henry Hub price), on Oct. 24 the Appalachian price was averaging $3/Mcf! Just 12 cents below Henry. A movement of $2/Mcf! Behold the power of pipelines and why we write about them so much.
The Natural Gas Supply Association (NGSA) yesterday released its 2018-2019 Winter Outlook for Natural Gas report (summary below). NGSA says this winter will have warmer than normal temperatures for much of the country. They also predict natural gas demand will reach an all-time high. However, natural gas production will hit all-time highs too. So in the end, prices for natgas (a function of supply and demand) will stay fairly even.
Natural gas produced in the Marcellus region historically has had a hard time fetching prices anywhere close to the benchmark Henry Hub price in southern Louisiana. Why? Because we have so darned much of it! Too much. Not enough ways to get our gas to other markets where it would fetch a higher price. That’s beginning to change. The “differential” (the difference between HH and our prices) is starting to narrow. Marcellus prices are coming much closer to the prices HH gas gets. That’s because of new pipelines coming online to cart our gas to other markets. Our favorite government agency, the U.S. Energy Information Administration, wrote a post yesterday on their Today in Energy website pointing out the decreasing gap in prices between the Marcellus and HH…
The single biggest factor in whether or not gas drillers are willing to roll the dice and drill another well is….the price of natural gas. When prices are low, say below $3 per thousand cubic feet (Mcf), drillers are less willing to ramp up the rigs and drill new holes in the ground. When the price goes significantly above $3/Mcf, they’re much more likely to drill. Everyone keeps a close eye on the price. We’ve just come through a hard winter that drew down stocks of natural gas in reserve. Less supply with the same or increasing demand equals higher prices. However, if drillers produce more, a lot more, then supply will meet, or even exceed increased demand and the price will stay about the same, or even decrease. So what about the price for natural gas this summer? The Natural Gas Supply Association (NGSA) has just hauled out its crystal ball to predict what may happen with the price of natgas this summer. As our headline indicates, NGSA believes the price will remain about where it is now. From the report (full copy below): “Our expectation for flat price pressure is based on a forecast for tremendous growth in demand that is matched by even more impressive growth in production”…
In our headline we pose a question asking if private equity (PE) money is about to be lavished on the oil and gas sector once again. The short answer, according to an analyst who writes about these things, is YES! Anthony Mirhaydari, a senior financial writer at PitchBook, says because of the current high price of oil, “After a drought of investment as management teams aggressively trimmed expenses to stay afloat, an aggressive ramp-up in spending is needed.” According to Deloitte, the oil and gas industry will need to spend on the order of $3 trillion in capital expenditures from now until 2020 (two short years away). Some of that money comes from profits or is already in hand from other sources. But, according to Deloitte, “there is a funding gap of $750 billion to $2 trillion that will need to be met with outside capital.” That trillion dollar delta is where private equity comes in–private investors once again opening up their wallets so more oil and gas drilling can happen. And that’s good news for the entire industry, including the Marcellus/Utica region. More money = more drilling…
Private equity firm EnerVest owns a lot of acreage and wells (most of them conventional) in the Marcellus/Utica region. In addition to investing in land and wells, EnerVest also has its own drilling subsidiary, EV Energy Partners (EVEP), with operations and assets in OH, PA and WV. EVEP is an MLP–a master limited partnership. While EVEP is joined at the hip with EnerVest, they are (on paper) two different companies. EnerVest has vast holdings and is in the top 25 oil & gas companies in the nation. Last July the Wall Street Journal ran a story that said EnerVest was worth nothing on paper. EnerVest pushed back on that story saying it wasn’t true–at least not completely true. EnerVest chief administrative officer, Ron Whitmire, said the company’s vast holdings are structured as more than a dozen companies. Although some of EnerVest’s companies are in trouble, the entire pie, according to Whitmire, is not in danger of bankruptcy. Conversely, Whitmire’s comment also meant that at least one or more of the EnerVest companies were/are in danger of bankruptcy. EVEP was one of them, filing in early April (see 
Here’s a theme we have been writing about more and more–because it’s important. That theme is this: Oil drillers in Texas (and New Mexico), in the Permian Basin, are drilling so fast and so furious to get oil out of the ground, that they are creating an overabundance of natural gas that increasingly competes with Marcellus/Utica gas. How? Every time you drill for one hydrocarbon, like oil, other hydrocarbons often come of the ground with it. In this case, natural gas. The unintended but significant quantities of natgas coming out of the ground along with Permian oil is referred to in the biz as “associated gas.” As we wrote in March, natural gas prices in Texas did something that hasn’t happened in years–they became cheaper than the price of natural gas selling in the saturated Marcellus/Utica (see