Trend

Following the trend toward liquids-rich basins, Penn Virginia Corp. recently announced plans to sell much of its Mid-continent assets to an undisclosed buyer for $30.5 million.

Prices were in modest rally mode at a large majority of points Wednesday as heat levels began to trend upward again in key northern market areas and what had previously appeared to be a benign tropical wave south of Cuba was designated as Tropical Storm Don in the afternoon as it headed into the Gulf of Mexico.

The trend toward increased drilling for crude oil, which was first noticed a year ago, has continued throughout the second quarter, the American Petroleum Institute (API) reported Friday.

The capital costs for building a typical natural gas-fired electric generation plant are going up, and it appears to be a trend in that upward direction for the first time in nearly a decade, according to the IHS Cambridge Energy Research Associates (CERA) capital cost index for North America released on Wednesday.

Consensus was hard to find among natural gas cash market traders Monday as the recent trend of squirrelly back-and-forth futures trading left cash points all over the board for delivery on Tuesday. Most regions saw a healthy mix of gains and losses on Monday, with the exception of the Rockies and the West Coast, which were uniformly higher.

Goodrich Petroleum Corp. has purchased leases totaling about 74,000 net acres in the Tuscaloosa Marine Shale (TMS) oil trend in Louisiana and Mississippi for an average $175 per net acre, the Houston-based company said Monday.

July natural gas futures inched higher Tuesday as traders see the market needing to overcome difficult technical resistance before any trend higher can be resumed while others see the market at a turning point. At the close July had advanced a miserly 0.4 cent to $4.831 and August futures were up 0.1 cent to $4.858. July crude oil rose 8 cents to $99.09/bbl.

Last year “large overseas companies” invested more than $15 billion in U.S. shale plays, and they weren’t putting down the money to “expect juicy margins at $4/Mcf gas,” analysts with Raymond James & Associates Inc. said Monday.

With its natural gas supplies more than adequate for the time being, government and industry in Pennsylvania are following a national trend by looking for ways to increase natural gas demand over the coming decade.