Gas prices are at $4.65/MMBtu, with a high of $5.02 and a low of $4.40 in the last month. Prices are stabilizing a bit, but who knows what the near future is going to bring. There are 663 drilling rigs, up 28 since last month. That slow but steady increase continues. Will it remain slow but steady with the war in Ukraine? Natural gas in storage is at 1,519 billion cubic feet, well below the five year average, but not the lowest we’ve seen in five years.

Well, it’s more bad news for the Mountain Valley Pipeline.

The West Virginia legislature continues to loosen regulations on above ground storage tanks. Not everyone is happy about that.

With oil prices pushing $100/bbl, we can expect to see increased oil drilling and along with increased oil drilling comes “associated gas”, the natural gas that is produced in association with oil. The Marcellus Shale doesn’t produce oil, so we don’t have associated gas. We just produce gas. Associated gas usually takes some of the market away from those of us in the areas that only produce gas. This time around, that may not be the case.

Joe Manchin is starting to throw some of his political weight at the MVP and FERC. The catalyst for this is FERC changing its review process for pipelines and other projects. The review process will now include a project’s effects on climate change, landowners, environmental justice communities, and the economy.

A California utility is building a pipeline, but for hydrogen. Since it won’t cross state lines it won’t have to go through FERC, so we won’t see a fight there. It’s hard to imagine that there would be fight there anyways, though, since hydrogen is the latest environmentalist “savior energy”. (Natural gas was a “savior energy” not terribly long ago.) This thing won’t see any opposition, even though it’s going to cross high desert mountains, a far more environmentally sensitive area than the Appalachians.

West Virginia’s new-ish Public Energy Authority had its first meeting. It will be interesting to watch the progress of the committee, and we hope it will make decisions that will benefit natural gas development.

Jim Justice met with other West Virginia politicians to discuss the hydrogen hub plan, and he pushed for energy independence.

Russia invaded Ukraine and all of a sudden Germany is re-thinking its energy policies which previously were very reliant on Russian natural gas. One part of that is to build two new LNG terminals, which will very likely be supplied by the US.

EQT is investing in fuel cells.

IEA members agreed to release 60 million barrels of oil in response to skyrocketing oil prices.

Senator Joe Manchin is stepping into the ring with FERC over the MVP. This could get interesting.

Hacking of oil and gas companies, including EQT, increased in the days prior to the Ukraine invasion, and Russia was responsible for at least some of it.

The Biden administration seems to be coming around to the idea that the U.S. needs to produce more natural gas and oil.

The Biden administration had banned imports of oil, natural gas, and coal from Russia. While this is a good step, we don’t import much of Russia’s output. The rest goes to Europe and some other buyers. Europe needs to get on board, too.

It looks like forced pooling is going to be a real thing in West Virginia now. The House passed a bill that the Senate already passed, with some changes. The Senate approved the changes, and the bill is on to the Governor, who will likely sign it into law. This is disappointing.

HG Energy is for sale. Anybody have a spare $3 billion lying around?

EQT has made a plan to “unleash natural gas“. Some of the numbers are pretty interesting, but the plan relies on a new 6,500 miles of pipelines, which are hard to get through the FERC approval process right now. I’ll be interested to see how he plans to change FERC’s approval process.

West Virginia Senator Joe Manchin is now suggesting that the President use the Defense Production Act to allow the Mountain Valley Pipeline to get built. He’s also suggesting he might use legislation to get it built. He really wants this thing built.