Natural Gas Sell-Off -- Did The US EPA Have A Hand In It? September 6, 2022

There was a headline today that "natural gas sold off today." I don't know accurate that headline is/was. Oilprice.com suggests natural gas fell 1.65% to $8.011, about a buck lower than recent highs and as much as almost two dollars lower from just a few months ago, all this coming at a time that the energy crisis worsens in Europe.

From yesterday on the blog:

Natural gas: I've said from the beginning, I have a pretty good understanding of oil -- understanding maybe five percent of all there is to know, but I have no understanding of natural gas. After years of blogging, I have learned one thing about natural gas. Producers can produce a lot of it very quickly, if necessary. And today, we see it again. From Charles Kennedy:

And that's why I've never been a big fan in investing in pure-play natural gas producers. From the linked article:

U.S. natural gas futures shed around 5% on Tuesday, hitting a four-week low as soaring output coupled with lower demand forecasts drags prices down, despite the fact that inventories are 11% lower than their five-year norm. Output is still holding strong after the latest report from the Energy Information Administration (EIA) for the week ending August 26, which showed a natural gas inventory build of 61 billion cubic feet. While that brings inventory to 2,640 Bcf, it is still 228 Bcf below levels at the same time last year–heading into the winter season. 

Also prompting the decline is the outage at the key Freeport LNG export plant on the Gulf coast. 

That outage means traders are calculating some 2 billion cubic feet of gas per day that is not being consumed by Freeport for export and is remaining on the domestic market.

Freeport–which accounts for some 20% of U.S. LNG export capacity–looks set to remain offline until sometime in the first half of November, at which point we could see only a partial startup, ramping up to full capacity by the end of that month. Freeport, however, has already pushed back a restart date several times since declaring force majeure–and then revoking it–in June. 

I anticipated this on August 20, 2022. 

It now appears there may be more to the story and that the US EPA may have had a hand in it.

I'm too tired to post any more tonight. I assume if this is accurate -- that there is more to the story and the US EPA may have had a hand in it -- we'll hear more about it tomorrow. 

As for me, I'm headed off for some reading and for some old Perry Mason television.