Gas prices continue to fall. Can't wait till below $4/gallon.
There is a limit to how cheap oil can be. The collapse of gas then oil prices in 2020 was a direct effect of Covid and forced the merger and closing of many small oil operations. Apparent a few people, like Fern, thinks the oil business is immune from inflation, from cost, from regulations and from lawsuits.
Companies are being sued over climate change and other nonsense. If the oil business were to shut down tomorrow, the entire economy will collapse. People will starve to death as tractors won't be able to farm, trucks won't be able to move any produce, and it will be 100x worse than the lockdowns.
Today there is no flush of new money coming in to drill for $70 oil. Inflation applies to oil and gas as well as almost everything else. The cost of drilling has doubled in the past 5 years. The rig count is down. And the reason is that oil and nat gas prices are too low to pay the investment back.
With the high cost of labor (up to $40/hr for a driller), high trucking costs, the nigh impossible task of creating a new interstate pipeline, almost daily fines from governments milking oil companies like cash cows, and even the mineral owner is seeing less take as their royalty payments are deducted for expenses, deducted for severance taxes, ad valorem taxes, conservation taxes, and both state and federal income taxes, their checks do not go as far as they did.
And the refiners are not immune to these lawsuits and higher expenses. And right on down the pipeline to the retail gasoline seller or natural gas supplier. $60 oil and we will see a lot of companies close their doors and a lot more simply pull in their horns and wait the markets out.
The takes are too small for oil companies to internally fund drilling. It's cheaper to buy a smaller company out. So 'drill baby drill' is going to give away to "pay baby pay or we can't drill." Perhaps in terms of making the most for the investment, the best investment for a small company is going back into the very oldest oil fields of Texas, Kansas, Oklahoma or even Pennsylvania and W. Virginia with a truck mounted rig and drilling small vertical holes near old fields that were abandoned in the 1910s-30s. While making only a few barrels of oil per day, these wells are much cheaper to operate, drill and produce. But they don't make the big flows of oil that a big company needs or that move the needle on the market. These "stripper" wells are simply better margins but too small for a big company to consider.
Ultimately oil prices must increase and gas prices are in the pits. I don't know if gas prices will recoup in the next 100 years. Certainly will not in my lifetime. I just finished a report and found while the posted "spot" prices of gas were well below $1 per thousand CU. ft. the benchmark prices were around $2...aka the "henry hub" price. (ps - you might be paying $10 per 'unit' (100 CU. ft.)
The price of natural gas is now about the same as it was 25 years ago and much less than it was in the 1980s. And the prices below are at the hub and are not the spot prices actually paid at the well. With transportation of the gas through pipelines being as high as 40 cents per MCF, the net dollars the gas drillers get is a pittance.
The problem will "fix" itself like it always does. When we go into shortage eventually, prices will spike to new highs and people will hurt. Wildly fluccuating prices are not good for anyone.
