Every Thursday, Genscape's clients receive a detailed commentary on the week's EIA NatGas storage number. Our team of NatGas analysts want to share part of that commentary this afternoon.
We believe that today’s 43 bcf of storage injection may represent that coal-gas switching likely will reverse sooner and greater than this year based on our regional S&D models and our Generation Fuel Monitor report. On the S&D front, lower 48 production this week increased by +0.5 bcf/d with the outages going away. Net imports are fairly flat. The weather was colder for East and Producing and much warmer for the West. For the East, Genscape nailed the 18 bcf of injection. For the West, the one bcf decline in demand week-on-week is reasonable with the warmer weather.
For the Producing region, Genscape’s proprietary data on power generation, published on Fridays, indicated that the average daily burn for coal remained unchanged week-on-week while burn for gas decreased from 6.6 bcf/d to 5.2 bcf/d. Week-on-week in Producing region, production increase and net exports increase likely offset each other. The increase in res/com due to heating load only offset a small part of the decrease in demand from power plants. The decrease in demand from gas-fired power plants is major drive that push about one bcf per day of gas into storage this week.
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