Generation Capacity

Last summer, a tight coal market in the Eastern U.S. made an already tight natural gas market even tighter. Low coal stocks, dwindling production and transportation constraints led to exorbitant premiums for Appalachian coal and limited coal consumption in the East, leading to record gas demand for power generation — even as gas prices soared to 14-year highs. Now, gas markets are considerably looser, storage inventories are high, and gas prices are signaling the need for more demand (or lower supply) to balance the market and avoid storage constraints this injection season. But the coal market has eased as well. Coal production is up, coal stocks are too, and Appalachian coal prices have plunged in recent months. What will that mean for power burn and balancing the gas market this summer? In today’s RBN blog, we look at the latest developments in the coal and gas markets, the potential for coal-to-gas switching, and how those dynamics could impact gas balances.

Appalachia — the U.S.’s leading gas production region — is also one of the last bastions of coal country in the broader Northeast. That dual reality makes it one of the remaining pockets in the region where there is significant potential for upside in natural gas demand for power generation. Gas burn for power in the Appalachian states — Pennsylvania, Ohio, West Virginia and Kentucky — surpassed power burn in the northern Mid-Atlantic market (New York/New Jersey) in 2017 and led the growth in overall Northeast power burn in 2018. The availability of consistently low-priced gas in recent years has hastened the retirement of coal-fired and nuclear generation plants in the shale producing region and fueled the addition of combined-cycle gas-fired generators, with more scheduled to come online soon. Today’s blog looks at recent and upcoming changes in the Appalachian generation fleet, and their implications for gas demand growth.

Market forces are driving an overhaul of power generation capacity in Texas — the largest electricity-consumer in the U.S. Oversupply and low power prices have increased competition for the state’s power generators, forcing them to shut down older or less efficient plants or plants burning more expensive fuels. Just last month, Vistra Energy — the state’s largest provider of coal-fired generation — announced plans to shut down more than 4.0 GW of coal-fired generation capacity by early 2018, the equivalent of nearly one-fifth of the state’s total coal-fired generation capacity as of August (2017). At the same time, generation capacity for natural gas, wind and solar-sourced power are on the rise. Today, we look at the latest power generation trends in Texas and their potential effects on gas demand.

We talk a lot here in the RBN blogosphere about the bearish market effects of the Shale Revolution, and frequently highlight the U.S. Northeast natural gas region — rapidly growing gas production from the Marcellus/Utica; oversupplied, trapped-gas conditions; and resulting regional price discounts. These dynamics are driving massive investments in pipeline reversals, expansions and new capacity to move the gas to market. Northeast producers are counting on that increase in takeaway capacity to relieve price pressure and balance the market.  But all this gas moving out of the region needs a home.  Fortunately, new demand is emerging, from exports (to Mexico and overseas LNG) and into the U.S. power sector.  One of the big growth regions is the U.S. Southeast, where power utilities are investing heavily in building out their fleet of gas-fired generation plants and are banking on this new, unfettered access to cheap Marcellus/Utica gas supply. Today’s blog provides an update on power generation projects coming up in the southern half of the Eastern Seaboard, based on a recent report by our good friends at Natural Gas Intelligence — “Southern Exposure: Gas-Fired Generators Rising in the Southeast; But Will Northeast Gas Show Up?”

Mexico probably has enough shale gas to meet its needs ‘til the vacas—or cows—come home. For technological, security and other reasons, though, it will take years for that now-trapped gas to be tapped on a large scale. In the meantime, Mexico is turning to U.S. gas suppliers, and billions of dollars of new pipelines are being built to transport vast amounts of gas south of the border from the Permian Basin, the Eagle Ford and other plays to run Mexican power plants and factories. Today we consider recent developments in U.S. gas exports to our southern neighbor.