A new LNG plant is opening up in Louisiana. Marcellus Shale gas will flow to the plant, be turned into liquefied natural gas, and shipped abroad. Demand for gas will go up, and prices will (hopefully) start to go back up. One plant isn’t going to make a huge difference of course, but more are coming online in the future.

Speaking of gas prices, this year’s slide into oblivion has been pretty bad. Prices haven’t been above $2.75/MMBtu since about February in spite of lower than normal storage levels. The main reason is that gas production has been able to ramp up to keep up with and even exceed demand, making storage levels moot.

Libya is still struggling with civil war. “Someone” turned off a valve to the Sharara oil field which produces about 290,000 barrels per day, dropping Libya’s production below 1,000,000 barrels per day.

The Texas Eastern Transmission pipeline exploded in Kentucky, killing one and injuring five people. It’s a 30-inch pipe, and one of the major pipeline running from here to Texas. It’s disrupted natural gas supplies and prices have jumped a bit as a result.

Antero is planning to keep costs flat next year, but will drill longer laterals and increase land expenditures just a bit.

The Atlantic Coast Pipeline is looking down the barrel at yet another legal hurdle.

One thing that the FERC looks at when deciding whether to approve a major pipeline project is the need for the project. An independent analysis has called into question the need for the MVP. Whether this analysis was truly independent is, of course, in question. But the original analysis for need was done by the MVP so that was hardly an independent analysis itself.

On the other hand, Roanoke Gas says that the MVP is critical to them not running out of gas.

Since we’re talking about pipelines, West Virginia’s Attorney General has filed a brief with the U. S. Supreme Court opposing the Fourth Circuit Court’s decision to halt work on the Atlantic Coast Pipeline.

There’s a bill in Congress that will improve national pipeline safety. This is a good thing.

We have too much gas. That’s the reason natural gas prices are so low. Lots of gas being produced from the Marcellus Shale, and lots of natural gas being produced with the oil from the Permian Basin are the main culprits. For the next couple of years there will be major natural gas project completions, such as LNG plants and cracker plants, which will drive some demand. But between 2021 and 2023 there are no new major projects slated for completion. That could make 2021 to 2023 a period of time when natural gas prices get really low and put a lot of drillers out of work.

It’s very disappointing to West Virginia that the proposed cracker plant will definitely not be built, at least by Braskem. The land is being marketed, purportedly with a focus on other companies that might be interested in building a cracker plant.

U. S. oil production growth is declining slightly and, according to a Forbes article, it will continue to decline. It doesn’t really give a reason why, though, so who knows.

Rig counts overall are down, but in West Virginia they’re up year over year.

On Saturday, January 26, a well drilled to the Utica formation, about 14,000 feet deep, communicated with several shallow wells, the deepest of which was drilled to about 3,000 feet. This is bad.

The well, drilled by CNX, and called the Shaw 1G, was being fracked. Pressure dropped suddenly and the workers stopped the fracking process. They discovered something blocking the wellbore. There doesn’t appear to be any information about where exactly the blockage is. That could be important because the blockage could indicate a failure in the casing. If there’s a failure in the vertical portion of the casing, that would explain why this well is communicating with much shallower wells. The casing failed and fracking fluid pushed out into the formation or formations that the shallow wells are producing from.

If, instead, there’s a failure in the horizontal portion of the casing, that means that fracking fluid propagated up through 11,000 feet of rock. The Marcellus Shale lies at around 5,000 to 7,000 feet deep in most areas of West Virginia That would mean that the fractures created through the fracking process in a Marcellus Shale well could potentially reach the surface and could certainly find their way into water wells.

The likelihood that the fractures pushed up through 11,000 feet of rock is low. Fracking has been going on for long enough now that it’s hard to believe that under normal circumstances this kind of thing would happen. There just aren’t any reports of it happening. There have been reports of water wells being ruined and of shallow wells being stimulated by fracking, however. Maybe this happens more often than we think, we just don’t realize what’s going on.

Update: The Pittsburgh Post-Gazette is reporting that there are now nine wells impacted by the problem. Interestingly, none of them are in line with the horizontal path of the well. It runs southeast, and the nine wells are to the north, west, and east. Additionally, the other Marcellus Shale wells in the area are not affected. This almost certainly means that the casing in the vertical portion of the well failed and allowed pressure to flow into a formation that all nine of the affected wells are producing from.