A Headline We Won't See Today -- October 4, 2018

The headline you will only see here: with regard to jobless claims, the 4-week moving average is at a 45-year low. Forty-five years ago was 1973. 

• folks working are not drawing (or drawing less) government benefits
• folks working are paying into social security
• many folks working are paying federal income tax
• some folks working are paying state income tax
• some folks working are buying Apple Watches
• almost all folks take some type of motorized transportation to work
• almost all motorized transportation uses crude oil derivatives
• what's not to like
• a lot of working people won't find time to get away from their jobs to vote

Jobs: wow, low numbers.

• forecast: 213K
• actual: 207K -- wow
• the 4-week average for continuing claims fell 13,000 in lagging data for the September 22 week to 1.665 million which is a 45-year low

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Back to the Bakken

 
Active rigs:

$75.89↓	10/4/2018	10/04/2017	10/04/2016	10/04/2015	10/04/2014
Active Rigs	65	59	32	68	190

RBN Energy: part 5 --unconstrained northeast gas supply growth spells trouble for Henry Hub. See this post also.

With the addition of new large-diameter natural gas pipelines like Energy Transfer Partners’ Rover Pipeline and Enbridge and DTE’s NEXUS Gas Transmission, the dog days of severely depressed gas prices in the U.S. Northeast will be diminishing (though not disappearing entirely), but they are just getting started for its downstream markets. After years of constrained natural gas supply growth, Northeast takeaway capacity appears to be outpacing regional production volumes more and more, and RBN’s analysis of production economics suggests that, left unconstrained, the Marcellus/Utica gas market is set to unleash an incremental 8 Bcf/d into the broader U.S. gas market by 2023, with the bulk of that volume targeting consumption in the Midwest and Gulf Coast regions. In today’s blog, we walk through our outlook for Northeast takeaway capacity and gas production, and by extension, U.S. gas supply.

Previously we looked at the influential role that Northeast gas production has had on the U.S. supply-demand balance for the better part of this decade. Lower-48 dry gas production has climbed 15 Bcf/d over the past five years, from 65 Bcf/d in 2013 to about 80 Bcf/d averaged over the course of 2018. According to our friends at OPIS PointLogic, we’re currently producing about 84 Bcf/d. Appalachia’s Marcellus/Utica shales have accounted for the lions share of that supply growth. As impressive as that growth has been, it has come haltingly, measured by perpetual takeaway constraints and severely depressed prices relative to Henry Hub and other destination markets.