Natural Gas Notes: R.W. Beck Projects 15% Price Cut

Energy Consultants R.W. Beck have cut their 2006 natural gas price forecast by 15%. From a company press release:

The latest natural gas market analysis from management consulting and engineering firm R. W. Beck, Inc. supports a reduction to its calendar 2006 forecast Henry Hub price - bringing it to $7.60 per MMBtu.

The new price deck is $1.40 lower than the $9 per MMBtu price R. W. Beck predicted during the first two quarters of 2006. The decrease stems primarily from January's mild weather, which led to lower prices during the second quarter.

"Taking into account the current storage overhang, with normal injections for the rest of the summer, we are projecting a November 1 inventory of 3.55 Tcf, only 0.25 Tcf higher than the previous high recorded in 2004," says Catherine Elder, leader of R. W. Beck's Natural Gas & Fuels practice in Sacramento. "We, therefore, don't think prices will go much lower, absent an extraordinarily mild summer or lower oil prices," she says.

Elder adds, however, that unresolved world tensions may lead R. W. Beck to maintain the assumption of oil at $65 per barrel into 2007. Doing so would increase the 2007 forecast natural gas price from $7.20 to $7.79.

The latest forecast is available for download.

Turkey, which recently made noises about wanting to build three nuclear power plants (possibly with Russian assistance), is apparently facing a series of blackouts and brownouts thanks to higher natural gas prices.

And finally, via Megawatt Daily (subscription required), a Merrill Lynch report projected that electricity demand growth will outstrip capacity additions in the U.S. by more than 31,000 MW through 2010. As a result, more natural gas-fired capacity could be pressed into service as peaking capacity as a "stop-gap measure."

Technorati tags: Energy, Technology, Electricity, Natural Gas, Turkey

Comments

A Design Team Pictures the Future of Nuclear Energy

For more than 100 years, the shape and location of human settlements has been defined in large part by energy and water. Cities grew up near natural resources like hydropower, and near water for agricultural, industrial and household use.

So what would the world look like with a new generation of small nuclear reactors that could provide abundant, clean energy for electricity, water pumping and desalination and industrial processes?

Hard to say with precision, but Third Way, the non-partisan think tank, asked the design team at the Washington, D.C. office of Gensler & Associates, an architecture and interior design firm that specializes in sustainable projects like a complex that houses the NFL’s Dallas Cowboys. The talented designers saw a blooming desert and a cozy arctic village, an old urban mill re-purposed as an energy producer, a data center that integrates solar panels on its sprawling flat roofs, a naval base and a humming transit hub.

In the converted mill, high temperat…

Seeing the Light on Nuclear Energy

If you think that there is plenty of electricity, that the air is clean enough and that nuclear power is a just one among many options for meeting human needs, then you are probably over-focused on the United States or Western Europe. Even then, you’d be wrong.

That’s the idea at the heart of a new book, “Seeing the Light: The Case for Nuclear Power in the 21st Century,” by Scott L. Montgomery, a geoscientist and energy expert, and Thomas Graham Jr., a retired ambassador and arms control expert.

Billions of people live in energy poverty, they write, and even those who don’t, those who live in places where there is always an electric outlet or a light switch handy, we need to unmake the last 200 years of energy history, and move to non-carbon sources. Energy is integral to our lives but the authors cite a World Health Organization estimate that more than 6.5 million people die each year from air pollution. In addition, they say, the global climate is heading for ruinous instability. E…

Sneak Peek

There's an invisible force powering and propelling our way of life.
It's all around us. You can't feel it. Smell it. Or taste it.
But it's there all the same. And if you look close enough, you can see all the amazing and wondrous things it does.
It not only powers our cities and towns.
And all the high-tech things we love.
It gives us the power to invent.
To explore.
To discover.
To create advanced technologies.
This invisible force creates jobs out of thin air.
It adds billions to our economy.
It's on even when we're not.
And stays on no matter what Mother Nature throws at it.
This invisible force takes us to the outer reaches of outer space.
And to the very depths of our oceans.
It brings us together. And it makes us better.
And most importantly, it has the power to do all this in our lifetime while barely leaving a trace.
Some people might say it's kind of unbelievable.
They wonder, what is this new power that does all these extraordinary things?

NEI Nuclear Notes

Search This Blog