Barely

After free-falling lower in Friday morning trade, August natural gas futures prices barely acknowledged that an industry-expected 78 Bcf was injected into natural gas storage for the week ended June 29. Instead, the market continued to plummet to a low of $6.360 before settling at $6.444, down 17.4 cents on the day and 32.9 cents lower than the prior week’s close.

A barely higher Cheyenne Hub in the Rockies was the only point that avoided falling prices Wednesday. The factors that have caused softness in post-Christmas trading at nearly all points were unchanged — light heating load due to unseasonably moderate weather for late December, prior-day futures weakness and bearish attitudes about abundant storage.

The UCLA Institute of the Environment’s 2006 “Southern California Environmental Report Card” assigned some barely passing grades to the entertainment industry on its environmental mitigation work.

Barely three years after a handful of producers began booking small reserves additions, the infant Canadian coalbed methane sector has earned respect in a new report on the national gas endowment by industry elders. The Canadian Gas Potential Committee, a powerhouse composed of veterans from agencies such as the Geological Survey of Canada and the Alberta Energy and Utilities Board, recognized 26 Tcf of CBM as “marketable,” up from zero in the group’s last report in 2001.

As shut-in Gulf production barely budged last week, gas industry number crunchers were just beginning to realize the magnitude of the gas supply problem that consumers will face this winter given the damage by Hurricanes Katrina and Rita. Forecasters are predicting that possibly more than 3 Bcf/d of gas production could remain shut in through December, which would put the cumulative total at nearly 500 Bcf of gas by the end of the year.

Gulf Coast gas production barely budged Tuesday, according to scheduled gas flows on the region’s major pipelines, Golden, CO-based consulting firm Bentek Energy reported. Scheduled gas production onshore and offshore Texas and Louisiana was even slightly lower on Tuesday than on Monday — 3,749 MMcf/d compared to 3,888 MMcf/d. That’s down from a pre-Katrina level of 13,820 MMcf/d, Bentek said.

The Minerals Management Service (MMS) on Monday reported post-Katrina shut-in natural gas production has barely inched forward in the past three days, moving to 3.784 Bcf/d compared with Friday’s report of 3.829 Bcf/d. The shut-in total, based on reports from 55 producers, is equivalent to 37.84% of the daily 10 Bcf/d gas output in the offshore. Only a few companies updated their offshore operations on Monday, and the lack of news was “not promising,” according to at least one energy analyst.

Although they lasted barely an hour and were confined to parts of Southern California, last month’s blackouts from a transmission emergency on a giant public sector high-voltage transmission line were used last week to pressure state lawmakers, energy companies and regulators into action. In essence, that was the prime motivation for a press conference called last Wednesday by Sempra Energy’s San Diego Gas and Electric Co. and in Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger’s push later the same day to revive his two-year-old proposal for creating a consolidated new state energy department.

The Senate had barely begun debate on the omnibus energy bill last week when Florida senators won assurances from the leaders of the Senate Energy and Natural Resources Committee that they would oppose all efforts to relax the congressional moratorium on oil and natural gas drilling in the Outer Continental Shelf (OCS) or open up Lease 181 in the eastern Gulf of Mexico.