No Wells Coming Off Confidential List Today -- August 6, 2021

Active rigs: the official numbers will be reported in the daily activity report which is released at COB of business, each non-holiday weekday. The data for previous years is probably correct in this graphic, but I do not know:

$69.73	8/6/2021	08/06/2020	08/06/2019	08/06/2018	08/06/2017
Active Rigs	23	12	60	64	58

No wells coming off confidential list today. 

RBN Energy: is another build-out of natural gas storage capacity just ahead?

If you’re a relative newcomer to the energy industry, the subject of natural gas storage might make your eyes glaze over — the sector is often treated as a backwater by traders and investors focused on liquid hydrocarbons. But it wasn’t always so. In the decades leading up to the early 2000s, the U.S. gas market underwent a series of fundamental changes, each spurring the development of new storage capacity, first in the Northeast, then the Midwest, and finally along the Gulf Coast. Along the way, the primary use of storage — balancing seasonal swings in gas demand — remained consistent, but there was also a wild-and-woolly period in the mid-2000s that was rife with meme-stock-like trading frenzy. It’s hard to say for sure, but we may be on the verge of needing still more gas storage capacity. In today’s blog, we’ll discuss the history and nature of U.S. natural gas storage to give context on what the future might hold.

It may come as a surprise that the origins of natural gas storage in North America began not in the U.S., but in Canada. It was in 1915 that a depleted natural gas well in Ontario was reconditioned into a gas storage facility. But as much as we love poutine and maple syrup, we’ll save our blog on Canadian storage for another day. Today we are focused on U.S. storage. After proof of concept in Ontario, the depleted Zoar gas field in New York was repurposed to help meet the wintertime gas needs of nearby Buffalo in 1916. The Zoar field is now the oldest operating underground gas storage facility in the world, and a testament to the durability of these operations.