Location, Location, Location When It Comes To Natural Gas -- March 13, 2016

This is a continuation of the story about the US increasing amounts of natural gas shipped to Canada. I separated it out because it also provides a nice comparison of Canada's Montney with the US Marcellus.

From Bloomberg/Rigzone:

The production gap between the two countries is significant.

Last year, Canada produced about 12 billion cubic feet a day of gas, compared with almost 80 billion from the states.

At the same time, drillers working the Montney shale basin in Western Canada face a disadvantage with the northern edge of the Marcellus basin in Pennsylvania sitting about 12 times closer to Toronto. 

The region covering the Marcellus is one of the few places where it’s still profitable to invest in gas lines. It’ll yield 17.4 billion cubic feet a day this month, 2 billion cubic feet more than the U.S. Energy Information Administration had previously forecast.

While the number of drilling rigs targeting gas has plunged to zero in fields from North Dakota to Oklahoma, there are still 40 running in the Marcellus and its neighboring Utica shale.

Gas futures for April delivery rose 3.8 cents to $1.826 per million British thermal units at 8:07 a.m. Friday on the New York Mercantile Exchange.

That’s where proposals like Spectra’s Nexus and Atlantic Bridge projects come in. The pipelines, scheduled to start up by the end of next year, would carry about 1.6 billion cubic feet of gas, or enough to heat 22,000 homes for a year, to the northern U.S. and Canada.

To achieve this, the company is seeking to reverse the Maritimes & Northeast line, which sends gas from Canada’s eastern waters south of the border. At the same time, Energy Transfer’s Rover project would deliver the fuel to the northern Midwest, where it will interconnect with a line stretching into Ontario.

Meanwhile, TransCanada, the company that was stymied in its attempt to build the Keystone XL oil pipeline, is considering reversing its Iroquois gas line, which has been sending western Canadian supplies to the U.S. for more than two decades. The move would allow TransCanada to boost volumes on the pipeline by delivering cheap Marcellus gas to the eastern provinces.

Note: both the Marcellus and the Montney are tracked at the sidebar at the right. You might have to scroll down a bit to find them.