EIA Predicts U.S. LNG Exports to Jump 18% in 2025 with New Plants
The EIA says the U.S. natural gas trade will continue to grow with the startup of new LNG export projects. In a Today in Energy post, the EIA says (based on its recent Short-Term Energy Outlook report) that it expects U.S. LNG exports will increase just 2% this year over last year. However, in 2025, LNG exports will soar by 18% due to three new LNG export facilities currently under construction that will come online next year.
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It must be its “predict the future price of natgas” season, along with tax season. Yesterday, we told you that BMI, a Fitch Solutions company, hauled out its crystal ball to make predictions about the “front month” contract price for NYMEX natural gas (based on the Henry Hub) for the next five years, beginning with 2024 (see 
Last week, the Baker Hughes rig count dropped three more rigs. It is the fourth week in a row the count has dropped. The count went from 620 active rigs two weeks ago down to 617 last week. Since last October, the national count has gone as low as 616 and as high as 629. And that’s it. No higher and no lower. The national count is 18% lower than this time last year (down 131 rigs). The Marcellus/Utica remained the same last week at 42 active rigs — the fourth week in a row for that count. Pennsylvania operates 22 rigs; Ohio operates 12 rigs; and West Virginia operates 8 rigs.
Robert Bryce is an American author and journalist based in Austin, Texas. His excellent articles on energy, politics, and other topics have appeared in numerous publications, including the New York Times, Washington Post, Wall Street Journal, Forbes, Real Clear Energy, Counterpunch, and National Review. Bryce also writes on his own Substack site. Last week, he posted a column called “Natty Nation: These 11 Charts Show Why The U.S. Is A Natural Gas Superpower.” Bryce completely delivers on the promise of the headline. In the leadup to sharing 11 great charts, he says this: “The notion that the U.S. should get rid of natural gas or that doing so would be a “bonanza” is — to use a technical term — total bonkers crazy town.” About 47% of all the homes in the U.S. rely on natural gas furnaces for heating. Heating with gas is far cheaper than heating with electricity. Yet the Bidenistas and the environmental left are attempting to force the entire country to give up natural gas. TOTAL BONKERS CRAZY TOWN.
Once a month, the analysts at the U.S. Energy Information Administration (EIA) issue the agency’s Short-Term Energy Outlook (STEO), their best guess about where energy prices and production will go in the next 12 months or so. We sometimes poke good-natured fun at the EIA because their predictions go up in one month, and in the next month, they go down, etc. What about the latest STEO dart board, published on Tuesday? EIA predicts the average spot price for natural gas will be $2.20/MMBtu in 2024. That’s down significantly (17%) from the $2.65 it predicted just two months ago in February’s report (see 
Natural gas is, as we have often pointed out, one of the purest commodity markets in existence. The classic supply/demand curve is at work. If there’s more supply than demand, prices for gas move down. And conversely, if there’s more demand than supply, prices move higher. We have been stuck in a sucky price pattern this year, not helped by a very moderate winter. The phrase on the lips of every landowner and driller is, When will the price move higher? According to analysts from Morgan Stanley, not anytime soon.
The Ohio Oil & Gas Association (OOGA) held its annual meeting in March at the Hilton in Columbus, OH. While MDN was not there, an industry friend sent along a copy of the slide deck used by the Ohio Dept. of Natural Resources (ODNR) Division of Oil & Gas Resources Management. The ODNR’s “regulatory update” addressed a number of interesting issues, including the state’s ongoing application for “primacy” in permitting carbon dioxide injection wells, permitting and unitization (forced pooling), updates on rule changes for drilling and fracking, and several “top 5” lists for natural gas and oil producers in the Utica Shale.
It doesn’t happen often, but every once in a while, academic researchers do real, actual, in-the-field research, as opposed to running computer simulations. Such an act of real research was just published in the journal Science last Thursday. A research group led by Carbon Mapper, with researchers from NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Arizona State University, University of Arizona, Scientific Aviation, and the Environmental Protection Agency used advanced aircraft to conduct the largest direct measurement-based survey of active municipal solid waste landfills to date from 2018 through 2022, looking for fugitive methane emissions. They found that 52% of surveyed landfills had “observable point source emissions” (i.e, they are super-emitters), as compared with a 0.2% to 1% detection rate observed for super-emitters from surveyed oil and gas infrastructure in California and the Permian Basin.
Oil production in the Ohio Utica hit a record 27.8 million barrels in 2023, up 41% from 2022, according to researchers at the Levin College of Public Affairs and Education at Cleveland State University. In December, eastern Ohio oil wells pumped 93,000 barrels of crude, up one-third from December 2022, according to federal data. Oil has been locked away in the Utica/Point Pleasant shale layer for millennia. Aubrey McClendon, co-founder and former CEO of Chesapeake Energy, was the first to see the vision of freeing oil from the Utica. However, it was a successor company, Encino Energy, that figured out how to coax large quantities of oil out of the Utica shale.
According to the data geeks at the U.S. Energy Information Administration (EIA), U.S. natural gas production grew by 4% in 2023, which was similar to the growth in 2022. U.S. gas production in 2023 averaged a whopping 125.0 Bcf/d (billion cubic feet per day). In 2023, more natural gas was produced in the Appalachia (Marcellus/Utica) region of the Northeast than in any other U.S. region, accounting for 29%, or 37.7 Bcf/d, of gross natural gas production. However, production growth in Appalachia slowed because our region doesn’t have enough pipeline takeaway capacity to transport more natural gas out of the region to the markets that would buy it.
According to Texas Independent Producers and Royalty Owners Association’s (TIPRO) latest State of Energy report, the U.S. oil and gas industry directly employed 2.04 million workers in 2023. That’s a net increase of 56,373 direct jobs compared to 2022. According to the report, the oil and gas industry paid a national average wage of $79,427 in 2023. Workers in Crude Oil Extraction earned the highest annual average wage of all oil and gas industry sectors at $220,863. Want a great job? Work in the O&G industry!