Featured Articles
| Tuesday Aug 11, 2020 | |
| Year on year the Lower 48 natural gas production is off from 93 to 87 BCF. Almost all of that is due to due to declines in associated gas production from the crude basins in Permian, the Rockies and Bakken. As of recent we are starting to see a bounce in some of those fields. This is being driven by a recent spike in the WTI price back in July. Since the first of the month several producing basins are showing more natural gas volumes get pushed onto the pipelines. North Dakota has seen a 13% gain in production in just the first week of August. Oklahoma natural gas has also piled on a 28% gain in volumes. Unless we get another catastrophic price collapse the crude and associated gas production should continue to rise. This is forcing the market to adjsut their production expectations ... » read more | |
| Monday Aug 10, 2020 | |
| Over the weekend, we saw temperatures start to rise as the next mini-heat wave is moving through the Lower 48. Such a weather event would usually fill up the bleacher seats at Wrigley Field or pack Yankee Stadium to catch a game where the players in pinstripes takes on their arch rivals the Boston Red Sox. With the pandemic still looming large across the country, the stadiums are filled with cardboard images of fans in behind home plate, sounds of the game are pumped into the stadium so players feel like they have support if they are the home team and a competitive advantage over their opponent. Baseball has a lot of eyes on it as it has chosen to keep stadiums across the country as their respective playing fields unlike the NBA and MLS who have chosen the 'Bubble' ... » read more | |
| Friday Aug 7, 2020 | |
| We have the Major League Soccer (MLS) finalizing its welcome back tournament as the match for all the marbles will be early next week when 'our' Portland Timbers take on the hometown team of Orlando City who just beat Minnesota in a decesive 3-1 victory in the semi-finals. Over in the National Basketball Association (NBA), we also have an Orlando bubble tournament/schedule going on with many of the playoff seeds already locked in so the major excitement is tied to the 8th spot in the Western Conference as Memphis entered the bubble with a 3.5 game lead over 'the' Portland Blazers. After four games, the lead has dwindle to .5 games as Portland beat Denver putting it's record at 3-1 with four games remaining. Once of the wins was against Memphis who has fallen on hard ... » read more | |
| Thursday Aug 6, 2020 | |
| With July in the books, the Pacific Northwest participants will look back on the month as one of the strongest hydro generation outputs on record as the delayed run-off of higher elevation snowpack in the north pushed volume downstream in massive amounts early and often. When you throw in the fact that the power loads are still reeling from the pandemic situation, the light load hours have not had a chance of getting into the natural gas stack which would ultimately help shift the power burn noms on GTN and NWP up to last year's levels. Figure 1 | Pacific Northwest Hydro Generation - Daily Average Year on Year Comparison The month of August at least started out on a better note when it came to the Midc light load bilateral market as the hydro output was down compared to the ... » read more | |
| Wednesday Aug 5, 2020 | |
| Over the past two days, the natural gas markets have seen a change unlike anything we have seen since pre-COVID19 as the front of the curve is up over $0.30. Such an uptick would make a lot of sense if there was news of a vaccine or if the stats were showing that states had the number of cases under control but neither of those two are present at the time. What is present is a new month with a weather forecast that is showing some heat in the 6-10 day period and an 11-15 day block of days holding above normal when it comes to the aggregated CDD levels across the Lower 48. Weather like this is a reminder of last week when it was hot and power burns reached a record high if 47 BCF/d. Such a demand is needed to keep the gas from being pointed to the storage facilities ... » read more | |
| Tuesday Aug 4, 2020 | |
| Texas Eastern has been under constant repair over the past few years as several ruptures have impacted the pipeline. The latest incident on May 4 was the catalyst for a Corrective Action Order from the Department of Transportation. In an effort to monitor and oversee the reparations they have placed limitations on the compressor ratings in the M2 and M3 corridors limiting flows to both the Gulf and East Coast. These are intended to be temporary until repairs can be completed. On the path to the M3 delivery zone which makes up most of Pennsylvania and into New Jersey throughput on the Uniontown compressor has been cut from 4 to 2.6 BCF. During low load times of the year like spring and fall this is not an issue. But heat events like what we experienced in July forced downstream ... » read more | |
| Monday Aug 3, 2020 | |
| As I drove to a friends house this weekend, I drove through two neighborhood downtowns close to Portland proper. As I entered the first, I decided to count the number of For Lease signs that were present and before I could get two blocks I was up to four. After swinging around a slight corner, two more were plastered in the window front of what used to be a vibrant foot-traffice area. After taking a right and heading out to the next neighborhood, the count was up to nine signs. After a few minutes of driving and thinking about the devastation to the small botique shops around the country, it did not take long to get the count up to thirteen as four more signs stuck out. It was not until I got to an area just past the downtown that the low point hit as the ... » read more | |
| Friday Jul 31, 2020 | |
| As the market share of grid-connected solar in wholesale power markets continues to grow its worth revisiting the ability to predict solar in time frames relevant to centralized power markets: (1) hourly forecasts made approximately a day in advance, when Day Ahead (DA) markets are conducted and (2) approximately an hour before Real Time (RT), when grid operators line up final resources for RT dispatch Both forecasts are important in that market operators need to have available resources online to meet variations in net load. And solar, with its large daily ramp up and ramp down, can have a big effect. Based on our examination of recent CAISO data, the following is a short update on DA forecast errors and typical impacts on market ... » read more | |
| Thursday Jul 30, 2020 | |
| It seems like only yesterday is a saying that fits when it comes to watching SoCal Citygate price itself over PGAE Citygate in the cash market. if you recall, you can go all the way back to the leaky valve at the Aliso Canyon storage facility or the pipeline fire that constrained flows hitting the SoCal North Zone, as a time of unrest and volatile spot gas settles. The volatility stemmed from not having enough molecules to solve the demand issue around rescom, industrial and power burns within the LA Basin. Figure 1 | Socal vs. PGAE Citygate Cash Settles - 2019 The figure above illustrates the SoCal vs. PGAE Citygate spread for all of calendar year 2019 with the blue line representing the former and the orange the latter. The beginning of the 19-20 Winter Season was ... » read more | |
| Wednesday Jul 29, 2020 | |
| U.S. nuclear outages have taken a rather unusual uptick in recent days. In years past, such an occurance would provide the seeds for some bullish uplift of gas demand, but not so much anymore. The amount of generation capacity taken offline for planned and unplanned maintenance has doubled in just the past 8 days, spiking from about 4.1 GW offline last week to about 8 GW today. This type and magnitude of increase is atypical for this time of year. Historically, nuclear outages peak in the low power demand periods of spring and fall, so that the greatest amount of capacity is available during peak-demand times of summer. Figure 1 | Total U.S. nameplate nuclear generation capacity that is offline. Across the U.S., there were five plants that are completely ... » read more | |
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