Daily Market Update March 14, 2019
Early Morning Update
The Apr19 natural gas contract is trading up $0.02 at $2.84. The Apr19 crude oil contract is also up $0.14 at $58.40.
Summary
With U.S. dry production continuing to stagger, the Apr19 NYMEX natural gas contract rose 3.6 cents yesterday, settling at $2.820/MMBtu. Production is estimated to be 85.1 Bcf/d today, no change from yesterday and down 1.5 Bcf/d from levels seen earlier this week. Demand, most likely, put a damper on any potential rally, as warmer temperatures spread across the country as winter winds down. However, the frigid temperatures last week will result in the largest storage withdrawal ever for the month of March. Market analysts are expecting the U.S. Energy Information Administration to report a 208 Bcf decline in stockpiles when they release their weekly storage report this morning. This would be the fourth week in a row that the weekly storage pull was much larger than normal, and far larger than the 88 Bcf draw seen last year for the same week, as well as the 99 Bcf five-year average. This puts natural gas storage inventories at 1,182 Bcf, with two or three much smaller withdrawals to go before flipping to injections. End-of-season projections are in the neighborhood of 1,040 Bcf, a 23% deficit to last year, and 36% below the five-year average.
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