It’s been a month! Natural gas prices are at $2.51/MMBtu, and have fallen from a high of about $3.20/MMBtu over the course of the month. That high was affected by the powerful winter storm in Texas and the Midwest. Rig counts are at 402, up five from last month. That’s a reasonable increase. In fact, that might be a little lower than what we need. Gas in storage (1,793) is below the five year average (1,934), but has crept slightly closer to the average compared to last month.

It looks like EQT is bringing more development to West Virginia. We’ve been seeing more EQT leases in the western part of Marion County, and this article supports our anecdotal evidence that activity is picking up there.

Antero’s quarterly report paints a reasonably rosy picture, with production flat and demand growing. While it would be exciting to see increasing development activity, having flat activity is still good. It means that royalty prices will stay about the same or go up a bit, and there will still be leasing activity.

The Mountain Valley Pipeline has had some slippage issues in Lewis County, WV. It’s a good thing it’s not already in service or there could be some real fireworks.

Mexico hedges its produced oil price using financial tools called options. In the past it has bought options once a year. Now it is going to buy them throughout the year. This should actually reduce some of the volatility of the oil market, just a little.

Oil production is ramping back up.

An article over at Seeking Alpha does the math and makes a pretty strong argument that next winter we’re going to see really low natural gas storage levels. If that’s the case, prices will skyrocket. Keep an eye on rig counts and read the next quarterly reports when they come out.

The extreme cold at the end of February used a lot of natural gas.

The Mountaineer NGL Storage project let a permit lapse last fall. They’ve reapplied. Does that mean that the PTT Global cracker plant is back on? Or does the Mountaineer NGL storage project have another client they’ll store liquids for? We don’t know, but it’ll be interesting to see when the news comes out.

Here’s one opinion stating that it’s unlikely that we’ll see any more interstate pipeline projects like the Atlantic Coast, the Rover, and the Mountain Valley.

The Saudis decided to extend their 1 million barrel per day production cut, which means oil prices will stay high (you saw how gasoline prices went up a bit, right?) and U.S. producers will start ramping up production again.

There’s another forced pooling bill working its way through the West Virginia legislature. It’s a bad bill. It would not give a signing bonus to non-consenting owners, and the royalty is 12.5%. I guess cotenancy wasn’t good enough for the producers, now they are asking for more.

12 Western states are suing the Biden administration over the “fracking ban”, alleging that the administration doesn’t have authority to use “social cost” as a factor in deciding whether to allow fracking on public lands.

The EIA is predicting an increase in demand for energy in 2021 and 2022. I mean, unless there’s another global pandemic or some such, right? Population grows, demand for comfort grows, and energy is needed for those things. So it stands to reason that demand will grow. What will be interesting to see is how much renewable energy grows in the same time span. Interestingly, the EIA said in a different report that natural gas use was down in 2020 except for electric power generation.