Mr. Ferara: The biggest issues right now for the natural gas space is, on one hand, you have the supply/demand structure, whereby you clearly had a decline in prices sustained for a number of quarters. And that has resulted in a lot of producers laying down drilling rigs, which leads to less of oil gas supplies. On the other hand, because of macroeconomic conditions, you have systematically less demand, primarily from a lot of the industrial companies as well as power generation facilities. So you really have a situation where demand is declining and the decline in production has not kept up at the same pace; so you've also seen lower gas prices as an effect. Gas prices bottomed to some degree late this past summer, but we're still generally well below historical averages.
TWST: Are we getting close to a balance here?
Mr. Ferara: It seems as if we could be getting a little bit better, although gas prices have been very volatile lately. The natural gas forward curve is back well into the 5 range for next year, so that's a bit better. What we're looking to see, and what a lot of the market is looking for, too, is to see how we come out of this upcoming heating season, which essentially has really just begun. Over the next few months, we'll see the range of basis spreads throughout the country, the level of gas prices and their outlook for 2010, where gas production is expected to ramp up and whether it will continue to remain strong in the various shale plays within the country, and how production reacts in the more conventional traditional drilling basins, which on average have higher cost structures.
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