Featured Articles
| Wednesday May 4, 2016 | |
| Over the past 5-6 years, the Renewable Energy drive has kicked into high gear with California taking the bull by the horns and implementing its Renewable Portfolio Standards program. This kicked off the whirlwind growth of both wind and solar across the West. Across the rest of the country, the penetration has been made up of wind capacity as certain states mandated their own program or the economics of wind generation (including the Federal Tax Credits) penciled out. The most notable increase over the past 12-18 months has been seen in both SPP and ... » read more | |
| Tuesday May 3, 2016 | |
| On Friday one of the oldest and most reliable pipelines in the country ruptures right in the heart of the Marcellus producing area. The rupture on the TETCo Pipeline in the M3 delivery zone stopped 1.4 BCF per day from flowing from the Delmont compressor station east of Pittsburgh to the Mid Atlantic. Immediately, upon hearing of the news front month NYMEX futures jumped 10 cents on the news to close the day at $2.18 cents. The market assumption that losing such a critical pipeline would cause supply disruptions and production to shut in after such a catastrophic ... » read more | |
| Monday May 2, 2016 | |
| Time time has come where the rubber is going to start to meet the road when it comes to the issues surrounding Aliso Canyon this summer. Just to get everyone up to speed, since the leak they found last Fall was plugged, there has been a mandate that Aliso Canyon cannot inject any gas. This mandate is in effect until they have inspected all the wells to make sure the valves are safe. As a result, the gas that is in storage is what it is and that has both SoCal Gas and CAISO worried during the extreme hot days this summer when the power demand sores in ... » read more | |
| Friday Apr 29, 2016 | |
| Spring is always an interesting time in the Pacific Northwest. The size and timing of the spring runoff varies from year to year. Fortunes are made or lost as energy traders try to anticipate the relationship between runoff, production, and price. Peak and off-peak prices during the second quarter are often the most volatile of the year in the western markets. April is so complicated that the reliability planners split it into two months. During early April, the threat is cold weather combined with low runoff can strain the system -- especially during the morning ... » read more | |
| Thursday Apr 28, 2016 | |
| As we get closer to the end of April, this past week has seen some record wind which has resulted in the middle of the day clears to come in negative for the first time in 5 years during a weekday. Let's take a look at the data. First, wind generation within the state of California has been on a tear as of late. Figure 1 | Daily California Average Wind Generation - 7 Day Rolling Average Breaking it down by zone (NP15 and SP15) you can see the steady output down in the Southern part of the state, while the North has been a little choppy. Figure 2 | CAISO Wind ... » read more | |
| Wednesday Apr 27, 2016 | |
| Yesterday's newsletter covered a recent update from the Texas Railroad Commission which indicated that total natural gas production in Texas had declined 1.25 BCF/day between February and January of this year and fell over 4 BCF/day from February last year. Texas has multiple shale plays, all with different economics, fortunately the commission provided district level information which allows us to match production levels to an individual region. In Figure 1 below we break out Oil, NG, and Associated NG production for Districts 1 & 2 which are primarily ... » read more | |
| Tuesday Apr 26, 2016 | |
| Trying to estimate natural gas production in Texas is a tricky proposition. Since most of the production is metered on intrastate versus interstate pipelines they are not under FERC jurisdiction to post meter data to a bulletin board. Forecasting services are left with the few long haul pipes that run through the state to gather their sample size. When reconciling the data, most forecasters will go back to the Texas Railroad Commission or EIA data to true up the actual volumes. To complicate matters, a significant amount of Texas natural gas comes from crude ... » read more | |
| Monday Apr 25, 2016 | |
| With the Pacific Northwest have a glut of supply hit their system (wind and hydro), there is plenty of MWs flowing down on the Paci and Nob lines during the middle of the day. Add to it, the fact that the in-state California wind is howling and producing a massive amount of generation in both NP15 and SP15. Figure 1 | CAISO Wind Generation Forecast It should also be noted that the overall load week on week has shifted down considerably across both regions with California's peak demand shifting down from 31,500 W to 28,600 MW for today. Figure 2 | CAISO Peak ... » read more | |
| Friday Apr 22, 2016 | |
| As I watched the Houston Rockets/Golden State Warrior basketball game last night, I could not help but think what the fans and the city have been going through the past few days. The massive rainfall flooded the city to a point it was shut down for a couple of days and lingering precipitation is no helping the cause as street are still flooded. Seeing all the fans in their red t-shirts did tell me that the city is working its way back to some normalcy, which can be translated into the energy markets. Here we saw the heavy rains impact the in-state natural ... » read more | |
| Thursday Apr 21, 2016 | |
| As the week finishes up, I thought it would be good to highlight some of the key elements impacting the market. Starting on Monday, April 18th (4-08, 408) it was officially tax day for everyone. In Texas, Mother Nature was not too kind to the individuals.tax accountants that left filing to the bitter end as a massive storm moved through the state where some hours saw up to 4 inches of rain. Needless to say, such an amount was enough to break a single hour record and rank right up there with the most rainfall within a given day across Houston. Figure ... » read more | |