Everybody

When Rex Energy Corp. announced in August that it acquired the rights to lease about 11,000 net acres in Carroll County, OH, for $40 million, the company said it was doing so to develop a prospect in the Utica Shale play and expand its acreage position there.

It seems like everybody and their brother and sister has begun pushing more drilling capital expenditures into “oilier” shale gas assets, somewhat at the expense of the drier plays. What will it take to return some of the former luster of nearly all-dry plays such as Haynesville?

Thursday’s market had a little something for everybody: large gains and losses coupled with small gains and losses, with a fair amount of flat pricing to boot. Moderating weather trends going into the weekend (except in much of the West) and the inclusion of a weekend flow day in Thursday’s trading competed with Wednesday’s 5.2-cent expiration-day gain by July futures for influence in the cash market.

While many industry consultants and analysts are predicting that gas prices will escalate to more than $7/MMBtu as soon as this winter and will hold at that level through next year (see Daily GPI, July 22), Massachusetts-based Energy Security Analysis Inc. (ESAI) believes the market is underestimating the substantial impact from increasing imports of liquefied natural gas (LNG) and will be in for quite a surprise near the end of the storage injection season.

As Mark Twain once observed, everybody likes to talk about theweather, and that was especially true in the gas trading communityTuesday. With the official calendar start of winter still more thana month away, it seemed like winter has already begun in almostevery region. The predictable effect was to keep both cash andfutures prices pushing higher, with the screen scaling previouslyunknown heights.

A popular Mark Twain quotation goes, “Everybody talks about theweather but nobody does anything about it.” Well, utilities andend-users don’t want anybody doing anything at all about theweather because it was the primary reason (again, for the umpteenthtime) for prices to return to double-digit descents Friday in mostcases.

Following an East-West swing market division the day before,everybody was on the same page Tuesday. Except for merely smallgains at western points where Canadian gas is traded (i.e., Sumas,Stanfield, intra-Alberta), double-digit increases reigned. Octobernumbers also were reported rising.

Mark Twain once said that while everybody talks about theweather, nobody does anything about it. And although that may haveheld true on a 19th century Mississippi Riverboat, it was not thecase in the natural trading pit Tuesday as traders bid up pricesthroughout the session on the news two new tropical systems hadformed in the Gulf of Mexico and Caribbean Sea.

That softening that everybody was expecting in vain since thestart of last week finally showed up to start off this week. Mostdeclines were in the neighborhood of a dime but generally were lessthan that in the West, especially California, and much greater thanthat at Northeast citygates.