Just received information that 2 more wells had their first sales in February and the remaining 10 may start to produce sales in the next 30-90 days.A lot of folks are waiting for these numbers.
"Our upstream portfolio leads the industry in quality, breadth and depth. We have the right strategies, always adhere to a disciplined investment approach, and are constantly managing the portfolio to extract and maximize value for our shareholders. Our base business is performing exceptionally well and provides us a substantial, longer-term competitive advantage, driving continued peer-leading financial and operational performance."
"Our plan for production growth is solid and will be driven by near-term project ramp-ups as well as our larger major capital projects which begin starting up later this year....These projects are attractive, and when combined with profitable production growth from our shale and tight resource developments, are expected to add over 800,000 barrels of oil equivalent per day by 2017. We also have a deep queue of other growth opportunities which should allow us to continue growing production to the end of the decade."
Looks like we end up close to 800bcf in storage by April 1st and we may have a cold spring, at least in portions of the Midwest due to the Great Lakes being frozen over.
Average build is around 2.0tcf, we will need a 3.0tcf build to get back to last years level. Close to an extra 4.5bcfd, maybe more if Spring is cold, will be needed. I don't see that happening. Massive increases in production to the tune of 4.5bcfd plus need to come online by April 1 - good April Fools joke that the futures market is playing on us. Likely it has more to do with CFTC regulations. The spriggett doesn't just suddenly open up by 4.5bcfd just because the draw season is over, it will be a slow build and may disappoint the Bears and the EIA.
I'm the ultimate NG Bull, but don't want to see our country have serious shortages next winter. If we don't have a hot summer or a cold winter next year, things may be OK, otherwise look for rationing and curtailments. There is potential for serious problems developing. The backside of the curve needs to move to that 5.50 to 6.00 area out for two years or the country will be facing massive shortfalls in production - perhaps as soon as next winter.
Canada is having storage problems as well - don't look to see them bail us out. This could be a lot more serious than what anybody is talking about. Mexico exports coming up EOY further exacerbates the problems.
JMHO, but I pretty much nailed it so far. Anybody think that production suddenly goes up by 4.5bcfd on April 1? There are 210 days on average for refill season. At a 1.0tcf deficit that means injections need to go up by 4.76bcfd to get us back up to 3.8tcf in storage - it Ain't Gonna Happen.
If we just get an average build of 2.0tcf, its a nightmare. The country will draw 3.0tcf this year. A 2.8tcf storage going into next winter is a disaster. Cold Spring, Hot Summer, could such a thing happen that the USA has Serious NG supply problems as soon as next winter? Well, the writing is on the wall, this is definitely going to happen sometime between 2015 and 2017, and it sure looks like its going to happen sooner than later.
Stock up on the low priced natural gas producers. Low storage reserve stocks are a given, the natural gas bull market is alive and well.
In Pennsylvania, Attorney General Kathleen G. Kane said her office had been flooded with complaints from consumers whose utility bills had soared, in some cases tripling.
In Rhode Island, the utility National Grid received permission for a 12.1 percent electricity rate increase in January, nearly all of it because of higher prices for the gas used to make electricity.This article is not in a "coal" journal. It's not from Rigzone. It's not from the Oil & Gas Journal. The article is from The New York Times. The editors won't admit it but they are finally starting to get it.
In New York, Con Edison increased the price of each kilowatt-hour about 16 percent this month compared to last year. And in Ohio, energy retailers will demand higher prices from customers like Ms. Cundiff when annual contracts are renewed.No war on coal? LOL.
Underlying the growing concern among consumers and regulators is a second phenomenon that could lead to even bigger price increases: Scores of old coal-fired power plants in the Midwest will close in the next year or so because of federal pollution rules intended to cut emissions of mercury, chlorine and other toxic pollutants. Still others could close because of a separate rule to prevent the damage that cooling water systems inflict on marine life.So, we will see what next winter brings. Let's keep our fingers crossed it's not frigid weather caused by global warming.
For utilities, another frigid winter like this one could lead to a squeeze in supply, making it harder — and much more expensive — to supply power to consumers during periods of peak demand.By the way, I don't know what the writers mean by "for utilities." The utilities will do just fine. The consumers won't.
Even predicting future oil output isn’t the precise science you’d expect. “We keep raising our forecasts, and we keep underestimating production,” Lejla Alic, an analyst with the International Energy Agency noted recently. Last year US production reached 7.4 million barrels a day, an increase over 2012 of 15.3 per cent. A jump that large hasn’t been seen since 1951. This year the US should produce 8.3 million barrels a day.
Take another indicator – the volumes of crude being moved by trains, often a mile long, from the shale fields to refineries and terminals. In all of 2008, train companies moved 9,500 wagons of the black stuff. Last year, 400,000 of them rumbled across America.
How long America’s shale boom will last is hard to forecast also.
In Texas, which on its own is set to increase production to 4 million barrels a day this year, the drilling peak still hasn’t been reached, says Mr Gallegos. But, he suggests, “in the end it’s not the oil fields or the wells that will determine where all this goes. It’s the politicians around the world who set the price and make the markets.” Increasingly, the decisions that matter will rest with the US, as it adjusts to its new status as a glut producer.A huge "thank you" to the reader sending me this link/story.
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The New Jersey Motor Vehicle Commission voted Tuesday to ban the direct sale of automobiles in New Jersey, forcing electric-car maker Tesla to use dealers instead.
The vote makes New Jersey makes it the third state after Arizona and Texas that will not allow Tesla to sell its vehicles directly to customers.
Tesla will no longer sell electric cars in New Jersey, effective April 1, according to Dow Jones.When this reaches the US Supreme Court, it will be interesting to see how Ms Sotomayor "votes."
The nation seems to be passing through a period in which too many U.S. Senators have been elected without so much as a high school level understanding of what drives the Earth’s climate and it isn’t the 0.038% of carbon dioxide (CO2) in the atmosphere.
On Monday, March 10, some twenty of them will stay up overnight on the Senate floor, according to The Hill, “to bring attention to the impacts of climate change.” You don’t get more idiotic than that. Climate, measured in decades and centuries, is always in a state of change. Meanwhile, the weather anywhere in the nation, determined by the changing seasons and responsive only to short-range forecasts, has turned colder thanks to a cooling cycle that is now into its 17th year.GE to supply 213 megawatts of turbines for European wind farms -- and so it goes.
The Obama administration said on Tuesday that 4.2 million people have signed up for private health insurance under Obamacare, and indicated that total enrollment could surpass a 6 million-enrollee forecast by the end of March.It looks like things are going from bad to worse for the ObamaCare health exchange in Hawaii.
Hawaii lawmakers are proposing charging a fee to insurers that are not participating in the state's insurance exchange under President Barack Obama's federal health care overhaul.
The fee would help prop up the financially troubled Hawaii Health Connector. The exchange has enough money to cover its bills for this year — but not beyond that, without some help.
In short, the drought gripping California has been observed before. And it has occurred principally because of a lack of rain, not principally because of warmer temperatures. Indeed, it should be quite familiar to anyone who lived in California in the mid-1970s, as I did. We can also say with high confidence that no appreciable trend toward either wetter or drier conditions has been observed for statewide average precipitation since 1895. This drought is not part of a long-term drift toward reduced precipitation over the state.
What’s different this time, however, is that the demand for water has greatly increased in the state, and it may very well be that the current stress created by the failed rains is more severe than for similar rainfall deficits 40 years ago. It is at least intuitive that growth patterns, population increases and the rising value of the state’s agricultural sector have increased California’s vulnerability to drought and reduced its resiliency — that is, the state’s ability to adapt and cope with less precipitation.
America's plan to use more natural gas to run power plants, make chemicals, drive vehicles and heat homes may not go as smoothly as expected.
There's plenty of natural gas in the ground, everyone seems to agree. But the harsh weather this winter shows there are obstacles to producing it, and more pipelines have to be built.
The bitter temperatures boosted demand for natural gas to heat homes and businesses. But wells in some places literally froze, making it difficult for some drillers to keep gas flowing. And the high demand clogged pipelines, so even when there was enough production, the gas couldn't get where it needed to go.
The ongoing crisis in Russia and Ukraine has, for some, highlighted deficiencies in President Obama’s foreign policy (or lack thereof). Breakout’s Jeff Macke likens it to the widely held belief that President Jimmy Carter was particularly weak when dealing with the Iran hostage crisis. “Apparently we stopped Putin by saying ‘you’re gonna lose all the good will you had with the Olympics,’” Macke contends. “It reminded me very much a Jimmy Carter-esque kind of scolding morality.”
In a year when California Democrats are worried about motivating their voters, Gov. Jerry Brown heard another unwelcome message Saturday: Some Democratic activists are bristling over his administration's policies on hydraulic fracturing, or fracking.
Appearing at a state Democratic Party convention in Los Angeles, Brown found himself forced to speak over a noisy group of sign-waving protesters in his first major campaign speech since formally declaring his candidacy last month.
"Just listen a moment," Brown pleaded at one point, as the protesters bellowed "No fracking" and waved "Another Democrat Against Fracking" signs just steps from the podium where he was speaking. State Democratic conventions can be boisterous gatherings, but the protesters provided an unscripted distraction in what was otherwise expected to be a unified show of support for the 75-year-old governor, who appears headed for an unprecedented fourth term in the heavily Democratic state.
Stockholm-based Electrolux AB (ELUXB), the maker of Frigidaire ovens, is moving production from a factory near Montreal, where it employed 1,300 workers, to Memphis as part of efforts to consolidate its operations in Tennessee, where it is receiving financial assistance. Factory workers in Tennessee earned almost 10 percent less in 2012 than the U.S. average, according to Bureau of Labor Statistics data.The Electrolux story is buried deeply in a story highlighting the fact that Warren Buffett closed a Heinz ketchup factory in Canada. Although the story focuses on this particularly Canadian factory, in fact, Warren Buffett closed two other plants, also, in the United States. Buffett said:
"The tomatoes are going to go to the plants that have the low production costs," Buffett said in November at an event in Detroit. "It's really a question of having an unprofitable plant and concentrating production in a more profitable plant."In addition:
The job cuts have come despite a pick-up in global growth and a 13 percent drop in the Canadian dollar since September 2012, raising concern that Canadian factories will struggle to compete with plants in China, Mexico, and even the U.S., where the much-touted manufacturing renaissance has been fueled by declines in real wages and two-tier pay scales that mean less money for new employees.There are a couple of interesting story lines here that circle back to the problems in Italy, reflected by the first linked article on Electolux. Cheap energy in the United States is only of the story lines.
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There are approximately 3,350 inland tank barges in the US that are all part of the Jones Act fleet. These barges move crude oil, refined products and petrochemicals along 12,000 miles of navigable inland waters – most along the Mississippi River system. Crude by barge traffic has grown 8 fold in the past three years and barges are over 90 percent utilized. Most of the increasing volume of crude moving from the Midwest to the Gulf Coast by barge is coming from Canada by pipeline and loading onto barges in Illinois. Today we review barge movements along the Mississippi River.
This blog is Episode Six in our series detailing the US Jones Act Fleet.
U.S. companies lag far behind their counterparts in Europe, Japan and even Brazil in the world of e-payments. American businesses and consumers wrote 21 billion checks in 2012, according to the Federal Reserve. That's more than four times as many checks as were written that year in the European Union's 28 member countries, according to the European Central Bank.A slippery slope: in fracking, more neighborliness. The story mostly has to do with overseas fracking.