Bloomberg Predicts Henry Hub Price May Spike to $4 with Summer Heat
According to Bloomberg News, commodities traders are “bracing for a record-smashing summer that will shake up commodities.” Bloomberg falsely states that people around the world “are already living through the havoc brought on by global temperatures that are breaking records.” Bloomberg ominously warns, “It’s about to get a lot worse.” Nothing sells like bad news, even if the bad news is blatantly false. In a hilarious statement in the same article, Bloomberg attributes high inflation under Joementia to global warming. Talk about sleazy and sick. Based on assumptions that Mom Earth will toast this summer, Bloomberg predicts natgas prices will jump by 50% this summer, to $4/MMBtu, because of all the extra electricity required for air conditioning.
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In a companion post today, we brought you Bloomberg’s prediction of $4 natgas this summer based on the false premise of wild, scorching heat from man-made global warming. Whatever. This post contains predictions by analysts with J.P. Morgan for the price of natural gas for the rest of this year and into 2025. J.P. Morgan’s predictions are grounded in reality, not wild speculation like Bloomberg’s. J.P. Morgan predicts the Henry Hub price to average $2.88 per million British thermal units (MMBtu) in 2024 and $4.75 per MMBtu in 2025. They break it down quarter by quarter…
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Yet another out-of-state protester temporarily blocked workers’ access to one of the few Mountain Valley Pipeline (MVP) construction sites remaining in Montgomery County, VA, yesterday morning. She was swiftly removed and arrested. According to Virginia State Police, 25-year-old Elsa Schlensker of Cleveland, Ohio, was taken into custody “without incident” and transported to the Montgomery County Jail, where she was charged with obstructing the free passage of another.
Here’s a sad story that, as far as we can tell, is not directly connected to the Marcellus/Utica. However, it’s a cautionary tale related to the oil and gas industry in Appalachia. Mark Edward Holbrook and his son Marshall Holbrook, both from Kentucky, worked in a family-owned company called Puissant Industries. The company sources natural gas by “drilling wells” and “acquiring gas rights.” We assume, given the small nature of the company, that these are conventional (vertical-only) wells and rights. When the price of gas dropped in 2015/2016, the company and the Holbrooks hit hard times. So, the two compensated by manipulating meters on the gathering pipelines that flowed their gas, making it look as though they were selling more gas than they did. In a word, it was theft — getting paid for something they didn’t provide.
The Pennsylvania Dept. of Environmental Protection (DEP) has extended three temporary air permits for the Shell ethane cracker plant in Monaca, PA, which would have expired at the end of April. The extended permits will suffice until Shell files for and receives what is called a federal Title V Operating Permit for air emissions from the cracker plant. In March, we told you that the DEP had told Shell to file for a Title V permit no later than June 21 of this year or risk being shut down (see 
Earlier this month, MDN brought you the great news that New Fortress Energy’s (NFE) proposed Wyalusing LNG export plant (in Bradford County, PA) and a docking facility in Gibbstown (in New Jersey, along the Delaware River) to load ships with PA-produced LNG, are not dead yet (see 
For more than a decade, MDN has brought you stories about shale development on and under land controlled by the Muskingum Watershed Conservancy District (MWCD), an agency formed in 1933 to help control flooding and promote water conservation in the Muskingum River watershed area of Ohio, an area that covers 8,000 square miles (
Last December, WATT Fuel Cell Corp. signed a seven-year extension of its lease to keep its headquarters in Westmoreland County, PA (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 company 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 
More than 50 “groups” colluding with ringleader Ohio River Valley Institute (ORVI) sent a letter to the Department of Energy (DOE) calling for the suspension of the Appalachian Regional Clean Hydrogen Hub (ARCH2), falsely claiming an “extreme lack of transparency” and lack of “meaningful community engagement” during project negotiations. Translation: The ORVI and its band of fossil fuel bigots are mad because they don’t know exactly where to go to protest each element of the ARCH2 project. They want to bully local municipalities and politicians to block hosting any element of the multi-million-dollar project. How rude of the DOE not to make it easy for the ORVI.
The price of natural gas is, in one sense, complex, with lots of variables depending on where the gas is bought and sold. On the other hand, it can be boiled down to a simple-to-understand formula: Supply and demand. Of course, it is the factors that go into supply and demand that make it so tricky to nail down and predict! Weather and LNG exports are big factors on the demand side. Production and storage are big factors on the supply side. A number of Marcellus/Utica drillers have scaled back on production. In the month of May, according to analysts with S&P, storage levels are “below average” due to more gas being used to keep houses air-conditioned (natgas is used to generate power, leaving less to be stored for next winter).
In January, President Biden announced he would “pause” any approvals for new LNG export plants (currently 17 requests in the pipeline) for at least one year while his people fart around pretending to figure out how to measure global warming as a new consideration for whether or not to approve projects (see 
LNG (liquefied natural gas) that is exported from the U.S. to Asia takes one of three routes to get there. One route is via the Panama Canal, crossing into the Pacific Ocean and on from there. Another is via the Atlantic Ocean to the Suez Canal and from there via the Red Sea, which connects to the Indian Ocean. The third way is sailing through the Atlantic Ocean and around the Cape of Good Hope off the southern tip of Africa. In the past, both the Panama Canal and the Suez Canal were the preferred routes, shaving weeks from the journey. However, given recent events, the dynamic has completely changed. Now, the preferred route is the longest route — around the Cape of Good Hope.
In 2020, Congress mandated a report from the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine to assess the U.S. Coast Guard’s ability, methods, and role in conducting the certificate of compliance (COC) program for the foreign-flag tanker ships known as liquefied gas carriers (LGCs) and to consider the need for statutory reforms. The National Academies released its report yesterday with recommendations for how the Coast Guard can and should update its LNG carrier certification program.