The Energy And Market Page, T+249 -- September 26, 2017

Equifax CEO: out.

Opening market: WTI unable to hold above $52. Dow 30 up 50 points. Mid-morning trading with 115 NYSE issues trading at 52-week highs, including: Home Depot, Phillips 66, Royal Dutch Shell, Valero,

• new lows:6

Tales of three plays: recent articles suggest the Permian is doing well; Bakken is doing quite well. Now the third of three plays, the Eagle Ford. Bloomberg has a story suggesting things are slowing in Eagle Ford.

If Texas’s Permian Basin is Exhibit A for the U.S. oil boom that refuses to die, then the Eagle Ford, a smaller shale patch some 400 miles to the east, represents all those places that have been left behind.

It’s not that the oil rigs totally disappeared after crude prices abruptly collapsed in 2014. But it’s awful quiet. The wells here aren’t the kind of gushers that make it attractive to keep pumping at $50 a barrel.

As the shale drillers moved on to richer fields, the South Texas landscape became pockmarked with abandoned structures. This nimbleness—the ability to just pack up and leave at a moment’s notice—may give U.S. oil companies a competitive advantage against their more rigid state-run OPEC rivals, but there is a human cost to it all.

Natural gas plunges on big injection, surging production -- Zacks. Data points:

• rose by 97 Bcf above forecast of 89 Bcf
• "worse": the increase was higher than both last year's addition of 54 Bcf and the 5-year average net injection of 73 Bcf
• result: the current storage level -- at 3.408 trillion cubic feet -- has widened its surplus to the five-year average of 67 Bcf (2% increase) 
• stocks are still below the year-ago figure
• demand side helped by hot weather in the East (air conditioning) and sharply higher power consumption in Florida as demand returned to pre-Irma levels