This post is up a few days late this month. Family responsibilities and an enormous amount of oil and gas news is to blame, not my lack of focus. Nope, definitely not that.

The price of natural gas is at $3.42/MMBtu, a crazy drop from the high of almost $7.00/MMBtu last month. In fact, it’s been a very consistent drop. The issue has been warmer winter weather than usual, leading to less need for heating. The price may have bottomed out, as there is a chance of a good winter storm coming through toward the end of January. The weather guys are all over the place at the moment, though. We’ll see what happens.

Gas storage is at 2,902 Bcf, right at the five year average. There was actually an increase of 11 Bcf last week, something that never happens this time of year. Rig counts were at 775, down one from last month.

Welcome back to prediction season! All the prognosticators, prophets, and seers of oil and gas will be giving their opinions about where the price of energy will go in the next year. Kind of like weather predictions, most, if not all, will be wrong. It’s the analysis that you want to pay attention to.

RBNEnergy did an article about the methane emissions that would be offset by the Mountain Valley Pipeline being built and used.

This article includes quotes from a number of legislators and makes it seem as if Joe Manchin’s permitting legislation is not dead.

Some northern panhandle residents are requesting more monitoring of a compressor station. The compressor is noisy and puts off a lot of air pollution. This is pretty typical for compressors. They should probably be a little more regulated and the pipeline companies should be more considerate of their neighbors. Good will does affect the bottom line.

The Freeport LNG plant is taking natural gas again. It’s a small amount, and the company predicts the plant will be back online in Q1 of 2023, so this is probably nothing at the moment. When it does come back online it will affect the price of natural gas, both domestically and internationally. UPDATE: a restart has been pushed back to the end of January.

Both natural gas and coal use increased last year. So did solar and wind use. So we are using more of everything, not reducing anything.

Lawyers representing the West Virginia State officials that are named as defendants to the suit that is challenging the West Virginia forced pooling law have appealed to federal court. This after the federal court remanded the case to the State court.

I think we should build the Mountain Valley Pipeline. I don’t think we should use misinformation to get it done. This article quotes Joe Manchin’s numbers, and while they’re correct numbers, they’re also badly used. First, he says that if we don’t complete the pipeline we’ll lose out on 2,500 jobs. Those are construction jobs, not pipeline operations jobs (there will be about 40 of those), and since the pipeline is just about finished, a lot of those workers have completed their jobs. Second, he says WV will lose out on about $40 million in severance taxes. That’s in the short term. Long term, all that gas is going to get produced anyways. He says landowners will lose out on $300 million in royalties. Again, that’s short term. In the long term, all that gas is going to get produced and those royalties will be paid. There are good arguments for completing the MVP, but these aren’t them.

Here’s another article about Atlantic Coast Pipeline easements getting released. It’s been a long, hard slog for a lot of landowners to get this done. Our clients don’t have to worry about it. We got language in the easement agreement stating that it would expire on its own if it was not used for a specific period of time. Every landowner should get this language in their pipeline agreements.

RBNEnergy makes predictions at the beginning of every year. These are not your typical “gas is going up to $100/Mcf” kinds of predictions. They’re more focused on things that will affect the balance of supply and demand. For instance, they predict that the Appalachian region will be constrained by takeaway capacity in 2023, with total production from the region being 35 Bcf per day or so.

A natural gas processing plant exploded in SW PA on Christmas morning. There were no deaths or injuries, thank goodness, but one family evacuated over fear that an additional explosion might follow.

Production across the Marcellus/Utica region dropped by almost 1/3 due to the the winter storm that dropped temperatures to below 0 degrees Fahrenheit and brought high winds with it. Regular production was restored within a few days. New England turned to fuel oil to provide its energy needs during the storm, not renewables. If they’d allow some pipelines to be built, they could use cheaper and cleaner natural gas.

Hope Gas is buying People’s Gas of West Virginia. These are utilities, so not involved much in gas production, but any West Virginia readers will want to know about this.

Right on the heels of extreme cold comes unexpected warmth, and natural gas prices are going down because of it.

EQT’s purchase of Tug Hill has been slowed down by the FTC, so the two companies have agreed to extend the deadline for closing.

There’s a new chairman at the FERC, Willie Phillips. He seems qualified, and there’s not a lot of negative chatter about him, so we’ll see how this goes. At the moment he has the designation of acting chairman, so it could be temporary. Here’s some analysis by knowledgeable people.

This probably deserves its own post, but for now this will have to suffice. The 4th Circuit Court of Appeals ruled that the Market Enhancement clause, the clause that Antero Resources always tries to get people to agree to, allows some post-production costs in some circumstances. We’ve encouraged our clients to wait Antero out, to not settle for the Market Enhancement clause. In some cases we’ve allowed our clients to sign leases with the Market Enhancement clause in it, but only where the other option was to not get a negotiated lease at all. We don’t like the Market Enhancement clause, and I think if you ever get a chance to read it, you will understand why. Don’t use Antero’s Market Enhancement clause.

We’ve wondered why Antero shuttered its frackwater treatment plant in Doddridge County. They just won a lawsuit against the company that built it for them, with $242 million in damages. That’s got to be what they paid for the plant. I suspect the plant was defective in some way that was impossible to fix. It’ll be interesting to see what details emerge about it in the future.

The first round of cuts for the hydrogen hubs is out, and West Virginia is, well, not out. Apparently there were a few applications that were TBD, including WV, but that’s better than being told no.

A food products manufacturing plant is locating in Marshall County, West Virginia, in part because of the abundant natural gas available here. This is the kind of thing we need a lot more of in WV. We should be adding value to our energy resources before shipping it abroad, rather than just taking it out of the ground and selling it as-is.