Drillers: Rigs drilling for gas declines

[dan_s]

USA Rig Count from Baker Hughes:

The US Rig Count for last week was 1809 up 6 from the prior week, and up 61 from a year ago.
> Drilling for Oil 1487 prior week 1473, year ago 1324
> Drilling for Natural Gas 318 prior week 326, year ago 389

The last time the number of rigs drilling for natural gas was this low was in August, 1991.

Unless we have a very mild summer and zero hurricane activity in the Gulf of Mexico, I don't see how we can get another 2,500 bcf back into storage, That would mean next winter will begin with just 3,300 bcf in storage. Last winter started with 3,834 bcf in storage.

This is going to get very interesting, especially if the refill season starts slowly.

[setliff]

dan, those oil wells in areas like the permian that has plenty of infrastructure are putting a lot of gas into production as a by product of the oil---are those numbers available anywhere?

robry has a positive injection of 10bcf for last week and so far +21 this week. we may have seen the last draw.

[dan_s]

Yes, they are counting on a lot of "associated gas" to refill storage, with most of it coming from the Eagle Ford and Permian Basin. Marcellus and Utica gas production also going up this year.

The EIA website has a forecast of 2,500 bcf going back into storage before next winter.

I don't where estimates can be found for individual fields.