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The Vulcan Gas Scorecard
Powerful Insights at Your Fingertips
The Gas Scorecard is now live on your Vulcan dashboard.
This valuable tool provides guidance on your weekly storage numbers and projected end-of-season balances. The scorecard updates daily at 10:00 AM Eastern Time.
This week, the scorecard indicates a potential bias towards lower gas storage levels compared to previous weeks. This is due to a surge in dark spreads (the difference between the price of electricity delivered at a specific location and the cost of natural gas needed to generate that electricity) for both PJM and ERCOT regions. Additionally, several coal plants are currently operating at extreme inventory levels. Total generation (total load) is higher which overall raises total gas burns. Also as noted in the webinar the EIA-930 is underestimating total gas burns this year.
Unless demand experiences a significant increase, Vulcan inventory counts are likely to rise due to increasing weekly coal production. As discussed in our recent webinar, coal production plays a critical role in determining future coal inventory levels.
While Vulcan counts remained flat last week, total inventories are on the rise.
Vulcan coal monitoring data will be available to clients by the end of each Tuesday.
We anticipate that high coal inventories at various plants could lead to "must-run" scenarios, potentially suppressing natural gas prices. However, this bearishness is tempered by the overall lower coal generation capacity being lower than the past.
Our data also identifies certain coal plants with lower-than-average inventories, suggesting increased gas burn in those areas could be required if temperatures soar.
We are observing higher load conditions compared to last year, and renewable energy generation has fallen short of expectations despite significant buildout. To address this, we will be adding capacity factor graphs to the dashboard in the coming weeks.
Vulcan Webinar: Gas Burn Scorecard