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Push has come to shove for Pogo Producing Co., which Thursday announced it has begun exploring strategic alternatives to sell or find a merger partner for all or part of its assets.

Push has come to shove for Pogo Producing Co., which Thursday announced it has begun exploring strategic alternatives to sell or find a merger partner for all or part of its assets.

Demand drives prices up, which spurs investment, which creates more supply: barrels, Btus… and employees. The energy industry will find itself seriously short of a variety of skilled and professional employees for quite some time, but the supply response is ratcheting up in a number of ways.

With natural gas inventories at record levels, there may come a time this summer when available storage space is hard to find and gas producers are forced to shut in supplies, according to Steve Harvey of FERC’s Office of Enforcement.

Demand drives prices up, which spurs investment, which creates more supply: barrels, Btus… and employees. The energy industry will find itself seriously short of a variety of skilled and professional employees for quite some time, but the supply response is ratcheting up in a number of ways.

After opening significantly lower Wednesday morning at $14.900, January natural gas recorded a low on the day of $14.570 before bouncing higher to find resistance at $15.080. Ultimately, the prompt month ended up settling on the day at $14.679, down 69.9 cents from Tuesday’s close.

Dynegy Inc. is “moving forward as expeditiously as possible” to find a buyer for its midstream natural gas business, a company spokesman said Thursday. However, with the midstream assets nearly sold, Dynegy also is rumored to be looking for a merger opportunity — the CEO said recently that Dynegy’s remaining power assets by themselves would not be a “sustainable business model.”

With arctic cold finally blanketing most of the Midwest and Northeast, the question now becomes whether this cold blast from Canada will be too little and too late to stem the fall of natural gas futures prices.

Talisman Energy made a major natural gas find in northeastern British Columbia. A successful Paleozoic gas well in its core Monkman area tested at a restricted rate of 40 MMcf/d with maximum open flow potential of more than 75 MMcf/d. The company said the well, 20% of which is owned by Seneca Energy Canada Inc., should begin production at 40 MMcf/d by January.