Natural Gas

Gas Producers May Withhold Production to Move Prices Up

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According to this Platts article US gas producers are feeling the sting from warmer weather and may try an OPEC like move to get pricing up. This could move electricity pricing up but this will have to hurry as the winter heating season end is not to far in the distance.

Voluntary US gas shut-ins in first quarter of 2012 foreseen by analyst
Knoxville, Tennessee (Platts)–3Jan2012/317 pm EST/2017 GMT

With the unusually mild fall extending into the winter, US gas producers’ “weather luck” has expired, meaning some operators may choose to shut their production voluntarily in the first quarter, a analyst said in a recent report.

“For the last seven months, Lower-48 onshore gross gas production has been running 5.5 to 6.5 Bcf/d higher than year-ago levels,” analyst Stephen Smith, principal of Stephen Smith Energy Associates, said in a note published on December 31. …

Federal Government

So Much for the Federal Regulators Crystal Ball

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The following post from The Barrel lists some of the activities the CFTC has been involved in this year. If you were to believe what Washington says regulators will save us because they will anticipate the mistakes and fraud that take place in the marketplace. What really happens is they are not any brighter than the rest of us and all the added regulations do is increase the cost in the prices paid and the taxes charged.

It may not have been historic, but 2011 was big for CFTC
By Brian Scheid         The Barrel

It’s hard to say with a straight face that 2011 for the Commodity Futures Trading Commission was truly historic.

The idea of historians a century from now breathlessly discussing the debate over the federal commodity position limits regime or a new market manipulation standard may seem downright absurd.

But the idea of future historians discussing anything the CFTC has done doesn’t seem as absurd this year as it did just a couple of years ago when the sleepy agency was just an afterthought, if it was thought of at all. …