Sheetal Nasta

After being in virtual limbo the past couple of years, the U.S. Northeast gas market is reawakening. New pipeline development is, well, no longer a pipe dream. Today, we begin a series evaluating the impacts of these changing fundamentals on the Northeast gas market outlook.

Northeast Texas is increasingly a key conduit for natural gas supply pushing toward rising Gulf Coast LNG demand. The region’s supply is poised to surge over the next decade, driven by new inflows from the Permian and rising local production, including from the emerging Western Haynesville play.

Producers venturing into the substantial natural gas reserves in the far-west part of the Haynesville Shale were historically thwarted by extreme geological conditions and poor drilling economics. Now, technological advancements and bullish market conditions are once again beckoning E&Ps. 

For more than 30 years, Henry Hub in Louisiana has anchored natural gas pricing in the Lower 48. But in the past 10 years, its role has shifted in profound ways. It has gone from a domestic benchmark pricing location for a vibrant Gulf Coast producing region to a demand-driven market and an index for U.S. LNG exports. In today’s RBN blog, we look at how Henry Hub became so integral to the workings of the emerging LNG market, both in the U.S. and globally. 

When it comes to midstream development in the Northeast, Appalachian natural gas producers have learned by now not to hold their breath. The region is notorious for its staunch environmental opposition to hydrocarbon infrastructure and its propensity for sending gas pipeline projects to the trash pile. Against all odds, however, midstream development in the region has thawed in recent months, in large part spurred by the unlikely advancement of Mountain Valley Pipeline (MVP), the long-embattled project to move up to 2 Bcf/d from the Appalachia gas supply basin to the Transco Corridor, which runs north-south along the Eastern Seaboard. In today’s RBN blog, we take a look at historical flows on Williams’s Transco Pipeline and what they can tell us about how MVP and Transco’s own planned expansions might reshape gas flows along the corridor.