Promised Cutbacks in Production/Drilling Lift NYMEX Price 11%
Finally, here’s a little good news to write about regarding the price of natural gas! The NYMEX front month futures contract yesterday started the day with a bang based on announcements from the previous evening (in advance of a conference call) from Chesapeake Energy that the company plans to scale back production by roughly 1 Bcfe/d in 2024 from 2023 levels (down 25-28%, see today’s lead story). Chessy’s announcement, along with rumblings from other big drillers about pulling back in 2024, was enough to boost the NYMEX, which closed up $0.20, or 11%, from the previous day. It was the largest one-day percentage gain since Thursday, July 7, 2022.
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The contours of how and why Equitrans Midstream decided to cut its MVP (Mountain Valley Pipeline) Southgate project in North Carolina are becoming apparent. We told you in January that Equitrans had decided to slice MVP Southgate in more than half (see 
Democrats will never be satisfied until they tax you for breathing and even existing, which was perfectly illustrated by a proposal submitted by the Pennsylvania Dept. of Environmental Protection (DEP) to its so-called Climate Change Advisory Committee on Tuesday. Not satisfied to try and force a Marcellus-killing carbon tax (called the Regional Greenhouse Gas Initiative, or RGGI) on gas- and coal-fired power plants, the DEP now wants to grow RGGI or some facsimile thereof to “all sectors” of the PA economy. Are they TOTALLY INSANE? We have to say the answer to that rhetorical question is YES!
Last November, MDN warned you about delays with LPG (propane) and LNG ships transiting the Panama Canal (see 
Two really big (huge) pieces of news are coming from yesterday’s Equitrans Midstream fourth quarter and full-year 2023 update. The first bit of news is that Equitrans is actively considering a buyout offer. The company doesn’t use that exact language, but that’s what’s happening. This should come as no surprise, given the rumor mill on a potential Equitrans sale heated up last December (see 
According to sources whispering to reporters from Reuters, Occidental Petroleum is “exploring a sale of Western Midstream Partners,” a U.S. natural gas-focused pipeline operator that has a market value of close to $20 billion. Western Midstream responded to the news report by issuing a press release to say it is NOT engaged in any kind of sale process. But that’s a bit disingenuous as Occidental owns a controlling interest in the company. So if Oxy sells its interests, it is, in essence, selling the business.
The money behind Big Green never stops. Where in the heck do they get it all? In November 2023, the Ohio Oil & Gas Land Management Commission (OGLMC) met in a public forum and voted to allow shale drilling under (not on top of) three different state-owned tracts of land: all 20,000 acres of Salt Fork State Park in Guernsey County, more than 300 acres of Valley Run Wildlife Area in Carroll County, and 66 acres of the Zepernick Wildlife Area in Columbiana County (see 
Last week, Antero Resources, which is 100% focused on the Marcellus/Utica with over 500,000 net acres under lease (and the largest M-U driller in West Virginia), issued its fourth quarter and full-year 2023 update, which we covered (see 
In June 2016, Massachusetts-based Clean Energy Future broke ground on an $800 million, 940-megawatt Utica gas-fired electric plant in Lordstown (Trumbull County), OH (see 
The number crunchers at the U.S. Energy Information Administration (EIA) published a post yesterday highlighting that in 2024, some 5.2 gigawatts (GW) of U.S. electric generating capacity will be retired. It is the least amount of capacity being retired since 2008, in the past 25 years. The graphic the crunchers used is somewhat stark and misleading. It shows the number one category of retirements is natural gas power plants, retiring 2.4 GW (46% of all retirements). What you don’t discover until deep into the post is that a single gas-fired plant, Boston’s Mystic Generating Station, which has been online since the 1940s (!), represents 1,413-MW (60%) of the gas plants retiring.
For more than three years, MDN has called out the International Energy Agency (IEA) and its executive director, Dr. Fatih Birol, as nothing more than tools of Big Green. We’ve reported on many of the IEA’s fake predictions about peak demand for oil and natural gas (see 
DT Midstream (DTM), headquartered in Detroit, owns major assets in the Marcellus/Utica region and other regions like the Haynesville. DTM issued its fourth quarter 2023 update last Friday. The Marcellus/Utica region (which they call Northeast in the report) received several prominent mentions during a conference call with analysts. Also of note were comments by DT CEO David Slater, who said he’s positioning the company to take advantage of “bolt-on” opportunities in the regions where they operate. Meaning he’s on the lookout for mergers and acquisitions.
In September 2022, MDN told you about a new 53-mile pipeline project in Western Kentucky — a 16-inch natural gas pipeline to feed natgas to the southern Pennyrile Region (see 
The Tennessee Valley Authority (TVA) is a federally-owned electric utility corporation in the U.S. TVA’s service area covers all of Tennessee, portions of Alabama, Mississippi, and Kentucky, and small areas of Georgia, North Carolina, and Virginia. TVA is the sixth-largest power supplier and the largest public utility in the country. Last May, TVA announced that it would convert the Kingston Fossil Plant (coal-fired plant) in East Tennessee to a natural gas-fired plant capable of generating 1,500 megawatts of electricity (see 
Last week, MDN told you about landmen knocking on doors in Pennsylvania, Ohio, and West Virginia, looking to sign up landowners for a big carbon capture and sequestration project (see