Natural gas prices are at $4.08/MMBtu, mostly due to a prolonged cold snap. The cold weather is going to continue, so we’ll probably see prices go higher.

Gas storage is at 3,115 Bcf, lower than last year, but still very close to the five-year average high.

Drilling rigs are at 584, down five from last month, but still within the normal range that’s been in existence for the last six months. Seems like we go up to about 590 and down to just above 580.

There’s a new LNG plant in Louisiana, called Plaquemines. It just produced its first LNG and will use natural gas from the Marcellus/Utica area.

Oil prices have been down, resulting in lower prices at the pump, but a number of factors seem to be pointing towards OPEC+ reducing production in an attempt to increase prices.

RBNEnergy discusses LNG growth, or more accurately, the things that have slowed that growth this year.

We live in the future. One evidence of that is what’s called a “digital twin”. It’s an electronic model of a real thing, and oil and gas companies are using it to improve uptime and production levels of their wells.

The Biden Administration has released a study on the economic and environmental impacts of LNG exports. This is the study they had been waiting for to determine whether to “unpause” the LNG export permit pause. Among other things, it says that exporting willy-nilly will raise the price of natural gas domestically, so we should be cautious in approving new export facilities. It will be interesting to see how the new administration handles this report.

The same day that report came out, S&P Global published its own report that says new LNG exporting will not appreciably increase the price of domestic natural gas.

If you have a Diversified well on your property, this is the website where you can get information about the settlement regarding plugging abandoned wells. You can request that your well gets plugged quickly, but it looks like that kind of request will only be honored if you’re having health problems associated with the well. Otherwise, they’ll be coming around sometime in the next 10 years (hopefully)and plugging your abandoned well.

Donald Trump is trying to force the EU to buy more US oil and gas, saying that if they don’t, there will be tariffs imposed on their goods coming to the US. I’m not a huge fan of tariffs, they make the price of everything, everywhere, go up. I suspect this is just a ploy to get the EU to move. After all, it’s in everybody’s best interest to get the EU off Russian energy and onto US energy.

Here’s some analysis of future oil and natural gas prices. As usual, read with a handful of salt.

Here’s a prediction of peak oil production. Every year there’s someone who predicts peak production, and every year production grows. Sure, it seems logical that at some point there’s going to be a day when there’s more production than there ever will be in the future, but nobody’s going to know we have hit that day until well after the fact.

RBNEnergy analyzes the needs of new AI data centers.

Chenier Energy has fired up another liquefaction train down in Corpus Christi.

RBNEnergy reviews its 2024 prognostications to see how accurate they were.

Ukraine has cut off Russian natural gas flowing through Ukrainian pipelines.

The oil and gas industry is consistently getting more efficient, extracting more product with fewer rigs.

Here’s a prediction that oil prices will remain around $70/bbl through 2025. That would be good. It’s a healthy number for the industry, and not big enough to make gasoline prices go up.

The Treasury Department has released the final regulations for the 45v tax credits, which apply to hydrogen creation. The final regs are more favorable to the natural gas industry than the proposed regs were, so we’re hopeful we’ll see some West Virginia natural gas get used to create hydrogen, and maybe even some plants get built here. However, the final regs are not what the natural gas industry was hoping for.

A well up in Gurnsey County, Ohio exploded and burned. No injuries were reported, thankfully.

Diversified Energy has acquired about 300 more wells and some pipelines in WV and VA.

Here’s an article that argues that the U.S. natural gas market is already so tied into the world market that prices are being influenced heavily by it.

EQT has acquired a company called Scale Microgrids that provides microgrid solutions to industry. It’s an interesting acquisition. This could be part of an effort on their part to make their own company less reliable on the grid, or it could be an effort to provide solutions to AI datacenters. Or it could be something entirely different. I’m curious to see where they go with this.

RBNEnergy writes about the regulatory and legal hurdles to developing new LNG exporting capabilities.

The Plaquemines LNG plant shipped its first cargo of LNG.

An enormous data center is planned for a location just northeast of Pittsburgh. It will be run entirely by natural gas. Some of that gas will be coming from West Virginia. It’s too bad nobody is building one of these in WV, but maybe someday? One of the reasons this kind of industry isn’t more common in West Virginia is that we don’t have much flat land, and this project will be taking up 1,395 acres of land. It’s tough to find locations like that here.