CEO of PetroNerds: What Lies Ahead for O&G in 2021
Trisha Curtis is president and CEO of PetroNerds, LLC. She was formerly the Director of Research, Upstream and Midstream, at the Energy Policy Research Foundation, Inc. (EPRINC). Since 2010, Curtis has led extensive research efforts and authored several reports on the North American upstream and midstream markets. She’s well-qualified to speculate about what lies ahead for the oil and gas sector in 2021.
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The Enverus U.S. oil and gas rig count slipped by one to 406 over the past week. The Marcellus play stayed even with 32 active rigs. However, in a good sign, the Ohio Utica picked up 2 new rigs to close the week with 8 active rigs (total of 40 active rigs in the M-U).
Late last week Shell shut down all work at its ethane cracker plant site in Monaca (Beaver County), PA to test workers for COVID-19. After testing roughly 7,400 (out of 7,950) workers Shell found 141 positive results, or 1.9%. Workers began returning to the site on Wednesday.
Big Green (Democrat) organizations are feeling full of themselves following the Biden/Harris election and winning control of the Senate. They’re making some pretty big boasts of what they’ll demand from Biden and Chuck Schumer. Demands like no new pipelines, ban natural gas everywhere, force all new cars to be electric, yada yada yada. One of the worst of the worst of the Big Green groups is the radical National Resources Defense Council (NRDC). In a blog post yesterday, the New York chapter of the NRDC lays out its 2021 plans that include their intent to try and block the construction of the New Jersey LNG export facility and block construction of the PennEast Pipeline in Pennsylvania.
U.S. exports of liquefied natural gas (LNG) set a new all-time record high in December, averaging 9.8 billion cubic feet per day (Bcf/d). The results in December were more than three times higher than the reduced export levels of last summer. Marcellus/Utica gas played a key role in those exports.
The Marcellus/Utica is the #1 natural gas producing play in the country. Last month the M-U region produced 33.6 billion cubic feet per day (Bcf/d), according to the U.S. Energy Information Administration’s December Drilling Productivity Report (see 
The average price for natural gas at the benchmark Henry Hub in southern Louisiana was $2.05 per million BTUs (MMBtu) in 2020. That’s the lowest average annual price in at least 25 years, maybe longer. The U.S. Energy Information Administration (EIA) says while natgas usage rose in gas-fired electric plants, usage dropped for residential, commercial, and industrial users due to the ongoing pandemic.
As we entered 2020, the stock price for most Marcellus/Utica drillers was near or even at the lowest it had ever been (see 
Yesterday U.S. District Judge Robert D. Mariani issued a couple of rulings in the Wayne Land and Mineral Group (WLMG) v. Delaware River Basin Commission (DRBC) lawsuit that should encourage landowners in eastern PA whose property rights have been “taken” by the DRBC. The DRBC has prevented landowners in areas like Wayne and Pike counties from drilling for shale gas under their land for more than a decade.
In February 2020 MDN brought you news about a new half-billion-dollar petrochemical plant that will convert Marcellus Shale gas into feedstock (chemicals) to be used in agriculture, manufacturing, medicine, and transportation, coming in Clinton County, PA (see 
Because of constant court challenges, the Trump administration just completed a redo of the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers Nationwide Permit 12 (NWP12), a general permit used in constructing pipelines. Antis believe the redo will make it easier for the incoming Biden administration to simply delete oil and gas pipelines from the permit. The cancel culture strikes again.
Well, the apocalypse has happened. We now have single party (Democrat) rule in Washington, D.C., and that spells trouble ahead for shale energy–for both oil AND gas. We’ll keep our opinions to ourselves on the politics. What’s done is done. Instead, we’ll let the analysts from S&P tell you what you can expect with new appointments at key federal agencies, and how energy policy under the Biden administration, with a big assist from a Democrat-controlled Senate, will likely play out in the coming years.
Walter “Wayne” Christian is a financial planner from Center, Texas, a Republican member of the Texas Railroad Commission (Chairman), having won the position in the November 8, 2016 general election. He’s an energy expert who thinks about and deals with energy, of all sorts, every single day. Christian recently penned an article exposing the attack now happening on American energy independence by the far left. He exposes the Paris Climate Accord for the fraud it is and he calls out “woke” investors who are pressuring other investors to divest from oil and gas companies. This is one article you need to read.