I've previously pointed out that our natural gas supplies are a lot tighter than they appear to be, and there's no way that additional supplies can be developed at the prices that are being promised for these exports.  What I'm going to do today is show you the natural gas data that I'm looking at, so you can see how I've come to that conclusion.

Since oil pricing, and hence the industry's plans for new oil field exploitation in the US, is still largely dependent on what OPEC does, we'll start by looking at the new OPEC Monthly Oil Market Report for March, which covers February OPEC & global data.

This week's oil data for the week ending February 10th from the US Energy Information Administration showed that our imports of crude oil fell back from last week's 4 year high but still remained elevated, while our refining of that oil fell for the 5th week in a row to the second lowest rate in a year, and as a result there was another large surplus of crude that was added to our oil supplies, which were thus boosted to an all time high.

Even with a record high in our gasoline production, the EIA reported that our gasoline supplies fell by 1,593,000 barrels to 227,143,000 barrels as of December 23rd. While our gasoline imports fell by 13,000 barrels per day to 434,000 barrels per day, our gasoline exports rose by 354,000 barrels per day to a record high of 1,149,000 barrels per day,

At their meeting in Vienna on Wednesday, the member nations of OPEC agreed to cut their oil production by 4.5% for a period to run 6 months, effective January 1st.  The amount of oil output each member is expected to forgo is generally based on their October production, although for some countries, such as Iran, the baseline for the output cut has been adjusted for special factors.   Libya and Nigeria, whose recent production has been disrupted by civil conflict, will be exempt from the cuts.