Stories tagged with "Jon Freise"

US Natural Gas Prices: "The Fix is Underway"

This is a guest post by Jon Freise. Jon has written several previous guest posts related to natural gas.



Figure 1: Future gas production based on final rig count drop
Source: Chesapeake Energy
-Click to Enlarge

"The fix is underway" says Chesapeake Energy in their April Investor Presentation. What they mean is that natural gas prices are going back up this winter. The number of rigs drilling for natural gas is going down. Fewer rigs means fewer new wells and eventually less natural gas and higher prices for consumers.

This is the third article investigating the possibility of a spike in natural gas prices during early 2010. In this article we look at the scenarios Chesapeake has created based on the how low the drilling rig count goes (shown in Figure 1). And we dig a bit into the other factors that could increase or decrease demand for natural gas.

An Update on the Energy Return on Canadian Natural Gas

This is an updated post on the energy return on energy invested on Canadian natural gas by Jon Freise. Jon's initial draft of this analysis, and related comments, can be found here.

An intermittent but longstanding theme here on theoildrum is that dollars do not sufficiently inform us of the long term details of energy depletion, and that the inexorable race between technology and depletion can be better understood using biophysical methods. Essentially this post suggests that it is requiring more and more energy to procure the same amount of natural gas in Canada, and this trend will likely continue into the future. This update makes the initial analysis too pessimistic on the rate of EROI NG decline but also too conservative on the absolute level of energy return. It is going to be a very interesting few years as Canada declines, Barnett peaks, and Haynesville and other unconventional plays ramp up. The treadmill spins on.