And just like that, February is over and Spring continues to draw closer. At least on our end, we’re looking forward to some warmer weather.
The conversation around natural gas has been about the extreme cold (and freeze-offs) being behind us and warmer seasonal temperatures being ahead of us. The huge withdrawals out of storage over the past two months are now only for the history books. Instead, the market will begin to worry about injection enough gas into storage for next winter.
This winter was much colder than expected, only made worse by the fact that last year’s winter was so mild. We are forecast to withdraw -97 Bcf for the week ending today (Feb 28th), which would leave us with 1,743 Bcf of gas in storage in the lower 48. Last year this time, we had 2,345 Bcf in storage on Feb 28th, a difference of 602 Bcf. This means we need to inject about 2.81 Bcf/day more gas than last summer over the injection season (214 days).
Between that and LNG feed-gas increasing between 1 and 2 Bcf/d, We are going to have a busy summer. But to brighten your weekend even more, let us leave you with a headline out of the Washington Post:
The near future is looking normal, and likely above average for the Northeast. So far, March is expected to be around normal.
