Here's an up-to-date graph of the NG rig count, from Baker Hughes data:

Got parachute? Hope in a year or two those boys are ready to multi stage frac like there's no tomorrow.

I related the other day how Morgan Downey said in Oil 101 that during periods of contango in crude one of the cures for the ascending forward curve is to build more storage - facilities, that is, I'm pretty certain he doesn't mean build inventory. Have to ask Morgan about that sometime, or perhaps he'll see this and elaborate.

Gail -- Investment capital will always be an issue of course. But there are also a limited number of reservoirs that are suitable for storage. Most are in the Gulf Coast. Unfortunately the main bottle neck is getting from here up north.

I've been watching folks try to develop NG storage for the last 15 years with very little success. Unfortunately when NG prices are low it's a great time to develop storage since one needs to buy a big NG bank to inject initially. But when NG prices are low there's much less interest in financing storage since the upside appears to far down the road. This might be the one area where the gov't could throw some sort of tax incentive. But how popular would throwing apparent "bail out" money to the oil patch be right now? Of course, the gov't could build and operate new storage. They've done it with the SPR. But that's a pretty simple operation compared to NG storage.