Lu dans BARRON's
Mar 16, 2012
4:50 PM
Will Natural Gas Price Sink to $1?
By Dimitra DeFotis
Chesapeake Energy
natural gas
Range Resources
Despite the plentiful supply of clean-burning natural gas in this country, futures contracts for natural gas predict that eventually, next year, prices are going get back to normal.
That means something close to $4 per million British thermal units. But the U.S. benchmark Henry Hub natural gas price for April delivery is around $2.34 per million Btus. And contracts looking to the fall heating season project prices near $3, with $4 projected for 2013, according to CME Group stats on the U.S. benchmark.
Next year is a long way — and a lot of fracking in natural gas shale formations — from now. And the standardized futures contracts don’t reflect regional prices: in the Rockies and at the Louisiana hub, cash prices for natural gas are just under $2.00 already.
With natural gas prices near 10-year lows, Raymond James Analyst J. Marshall Adkins and a team of five write that:
“Natural gas continues to get punished as the record surplus in storage brings some nervousness in the market. Everyone is talking about a $1 handle for the futures market, but when you take a look at the cash market, we are already seeing $1 handles … The lack of [cold] weather and steep fall in natural gas prices have led to a large amount of coal-to-gas switching … [though] we don’t expect this trend to continue … expect volatility in the natural gas market to continue with large up and down days … we are modeling storage capacity to reach full capacity earlier than expected, bringing the chance of a $1 handle in the summer and even possibly in the next month or so. Suffice it to say, the ability to reach a more equilibrium supply-demand balance solely rests on slowing down dry gas production even further, as associated gas has offset any of the recent declines.”
Natural gas producers must keep drilling to hold onto land leases, but dry gas production cuts are going to be the new normal – not a good thing for earnings. Citigroup Global Markets estimates the number of horizontal natural gas rigs will be further reduced to 400, from 462, versus an average of 612 last year.
Carrizo Oil & Gas (CRZO) sold some nat gas assets Friday, colleague Brendan Conway notes on the Focus on Funds blog.
Here’s how some of the companies with a decent amount of spending on dry gas have fared:
Mcap * Price* Price* EPS
Company (Ticker) (bils) YTD 12 mos 12v11
Chesapeake Energy (CHK) 16 10% -30% -36%
El Paso (EP) 22 8% 70% 25%
Encana (ECA) 15 7% -39% 12%
EOG Resources (EOG) 31 17% 11% 33%
EQT (EQT) 8 -9% 13% 5%
Range Resources (RRC) 9.5 -2% 16% 3%
Southwestern Energy (SWN) 12 5% -16% -16%
Talisman Energy (TLM) 14 5% -41% 57%
Ultra Petroleum (UPL) 3.6 -20% -48% -37%
* As of 3/15/12 close
Source: Citigroup Global Markets, Thomson Baseline
Finally: here’s just about everything you ever wanted to know about the U.S. natural gas market, courtesy of the Natural Gas Supply Association