Investment bank RAYMOND JAMES slashed its previous $4/ Mcf forecast for 2012 by 50 cents to $3.50/Mcf, and pre- dicted prices could drop below $3/Mcf this summer as stor-age fills

摘要

Investment bank RAYMOND JAMES slashed its previous $4Mcf forecast for 2012 by 50 cents to $3.50/Mcf, and pre-ndicted prices could drop below $3/Mcf this summer as stor-nage fills. “According to our working model, the gas market nhas been running 2.5 Bcf/d looser over the past 20 weeks, a ntrend we don’t anticipate slowing in the near term,” analyst nMarshall Adkins said in a note to clients. “We remain firmly nin the bearish camp and don’t see demand being able to ncatch up with supply anytime soon.” Adkins said gas pro-nduction is still growing at 4 Bcf/d per year because of dry ngas production associated with liquids-rich plays. Cheap gas nin the US will trim imports from Canada back to 1 Bcf/d nnext year, while LNG imports will continue to decline below ntheir sub-1 Bcf/d level, he said. Demand cannot grow much, nAdkins said, because most of the “low-lying fruit” of coal-nto-gas switching has already happened, industrial demand nis hobbled by the slow economy and weather-induced ndemand, using 30-year models, will not be as high as the n2011 season. “Our 2012 gas storage model indicates 4.59 Tcf nof summer-ending gas inventories, but we estimate there to nbe only roughly 4 Tcf of total storage capacity,” Adkins said. n“This means that gas prices will need to be low enough to nencourage production shut-ins or more coal-to-gas switch-ning. Either way, it doesn’t bode well for gas prices.”