Posted: March 20, 2026, 12:18 pm

Global Markets

Let the madness begin!!! Basketball?, nope, energy markets. Back in the day, we used to break down markets into CNBC and CNN markets. The idea was that sometimes the market is driven on fundamentals (CNBC), and sometimes it’s driven on headlines of the geopolitical type (CNN). It’s fair to say this market is being driven on CNN headlines that could change the CNBC long term fundamental picture. As we write this Friday morning, we have bulge bracket investment firms putting out oil targets of possible $300 while the market is selling off it’s highs near $100. Log on to your favorite social media medium and type in oil markets. Up will pop and long list of oil experts pontificating on the prices we are likely to see given recent events…before acting on these “expert” opinions, please remember that about a month ago, they were all experts on immigration law. Our point is the market will do what the market does and someone that has some clear sense of the outcome will be hard to find.

These are the times we like to remind folks, a good hedging or marketing plan is a must. Spelled out goals and price targets let you take a fair amount of emotion out of buy and sell decisions. That’s not to say all current events must be discarded, but you can 100% guarantee somewhere there is a small oil producer who was, two months ago, begging for the opportunity to sell oil forward at $70 and is now passing at $100 because they read a $300 target report. While the likelihood might not be high, it’s not a zero percent chance that come Monday, a cease fire and handshakes have occurred.

With all that, read the Pinebrook recap to understand why, in a world of market panic and volatility, the driver of the US electrical market is the sanest commodity in the room.

Natural Gas Market Commentary

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As chaos continued to ramp up globally this week, the U.S. natural gas market remained relatively calm in comparison. The biggest development in the Middle East came on Wednesday afternoon, as Iran launched a missile attack that caused “extensive damage” to a Qatari LNG export facility. With exports already effectively cut off from the region, this didn’t have much marginal impact on near-term supply, but the headline was a stark reminder that the effects of the conflict will linger well past any potential resolution. As news broke, global LNG price benchmarks rallied to new highs, dragging the NYMEX market along for the ride. However, as has been the case in recent weeks, the gains in the U.S. were relatively muted and proved to be short-lived, with the prompt-month contract, as of Friday morning, drifting back toward weekly lows.

U.S. fundamentals remain neutral to strong. With the most recent storage report showing a net injection, inventories are back to a surplus versus the five-year average entering the final two weeks of the traditional winter season. Production took a bit of a hit from the brief but intense early-week cold snap, but volumes should rebound quickly to the near-record highs above 110 Bcf per day that the market has been running at for most of the winter. More importantly, the January price spike gave producers the ability to hedge forward at favorable levels, which should set things up for some supply growth this summer. That should be more than enough to meet any uptick in export demand from the new Golden Pass terminal.

The bottom line remains: the U.S. natural gas market is the safest energy space in the world. Even if bullish sentiment really ramps up and we get a more volatile summer, the healthy inventory situation and strong domestic production should continue to keep natural gas—and, by extension, power—in check.

Jones Act Waiver

This week President Trump put in place a 60-day waiver on the Jones Act. Recall, the Jones Act is a 1920s law that basically stats that commodities, or goods, shipped from US port to US port must be in US built, crewed, and owned by US citizens. The waiver was put in place to seemingly to help with rising oil prices given the ongoing actions in the Middle East. Frankly, we aren’t sure how that would help given the argument is that ships can take oil to refineries. The fact is, the US already does a pretty good job of delivering domestic crude with pipelines and trains.

Since we see little value in the waiver, why bring up the Jones Act? This law is not foreign to the WPO as we have discussed this many times. The context has been with the ISO-NE. Recalling, even with the proximity to Pennsylvania Marcellus Shale, because of the lack of pipeline capacity, ISO-NE must import a large amount of their gas as LNG. As we’ve mentioned in the past, there are exactly zero LNG ships in the world that meet the criteria set out in the Jones Act to allow US port to port shipment. That means the LNG coming to New England can just sail from the Gulf or other export terminals to be delivered to the Everett LNG terminal near Boston. Instead of home grown gas, deliveries must come from countries like Trinidad and Tobago. Lack of pipelines has exposed ISO-NE to the LNG market, and the Jones Act has added transportation costs.

Cocktail Corner

Cocktail Corner was created to wow your friends with some knowledge that straddled the line of cool and irrelevant. This week, we want to give a toast. Here’s to the first day of spring and hopeful good riddance to Winter 2026. Bravo winter, you kicked our @ss.