Oil rebound’s dirty little secret threatens U.S. gas bulls

One of the biggest threats to an extended rally in U.S. natural gas prices is lurking in the oil patch. Gas production in most of the country has dropped amid cost-cutting. Not so in the Permian basin, the nation’s biggest crude reservoir and one of the few places where drilling has remained profitable. Permian drillers, led by Occidental Petroleum and Pioneer Natural Resources, are pumping more oil as prices rise, pushing natural gas extracted as a byproduct from the West Texas play to almost 7 Bcfpd, Bloomberg Intelligence data show. That’s about 8%of U.S. supply. More »