Decline

While the gas futures market was on the decline for much of last week and working gas levels in storage moved back above five-year averages, prognosticators at investment banking firm Raymond James & Associates are betting the gas storage situation isn’t nearly as rosy as it seems, and tight supply will end up pushing gas prices back above $8/MMBtu in the next few months.

Stung by reduced demand, natural gas distributor Nicor Inc. reported an 18% decline in second quarter profit on Monday. The company also revealed that it has terminated four employees in connection with their involvement in “potentially fraudulent” conduct in its performance-based rate (PBR) gas supply program that may have violated Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) rules.

The bearish storage report Thursday and associated screen decline, along with forecasts of flagging weather-related demand and the weekend’s typical dropoff in industrial load, had traders anticipating a soft market Friday, and that’s exactly what they got.

Shrugging off gains achieved in the nearby crude oil pit, the natural gas futures market set new lows for the week Friday as traders liquidated positions in concert with some negative technical factors and ahead of mild weather expected this week. At $6.442, the newly-anointed prompt month July was down 13.1 cents for the session, but still up 3.3 cents for the week.

Canadians are facing increasingly complex and difficult energy choices because of the country’s crude oil decline, flat natural gas production from the once prolific Western Canadian Sedimentary Basin and increasing development of new non-traditional sources of supply, according to the 2003 annual report issued Tuesday by the National Energy Board (NEB).

Canadians are facing increasingly complex and difficult energy choices because of the country’s crude oil decline, flat natural gas production from the once prolific Western Canadian Sedimentary Basin and increasing development of new non-traditional sources of supply, according to the 2003 annual report issued Tuesday by the National Energy Board (NEB).

Prices continued to drift lower at nearly all points Thursday, but the rate of decline slowed. Whereas double-digit drops had ruled the market Wednesday, most of Thursday’s softening was by less than a dime. Minuscule losses of only 2-3 cents were scattered through several market areas, and Northwest’s domestic and Sumas points managed to stay flat and eke out a small gain respectively.

Despite the fact that rising domestic natural gas production costs and increased well decline rates will team to put pressure on commodity prices this summer, Energy Security Analysis (ESAI) said Monday that it expects liquefied natural gas (LNG) will offset some of that pressure with another year of strong imports.

Consultants at PIRA Energy have news for all those Chicken Littles out there who estimated a gas production decline in 2003 and who are predicting another drop in 2004: production was up last year and it’s going to grow by another 1-2% in 2004.