Monica Verma

National Fuel Gas Heating Up

It's great to see someone else looking into these guys. Saw your posting as well and I guess we were thinking along the same lines.

The last response did seem to indicate that management was getting a little annoyed with the correspondence. We'll see in the coming weeks.

I do think that as more information becomes available, NFG will bump up for the shallow reserves. The problem is that the N/S report is only for the shallow. So using the deep valuation of its peers, the stock could have a great deal more of embedded value. It may be some time coming...

I did a little survey of a sample players in the area (which I'm happy to send over if you like), looking at capex, reserves, planned wells, exisiting wells, etc. Just to give you a sense of how slow they are going, companies like Range Resources (RRC) and Equitable (EQT) are devoting almost 3x the amount of capex to the region. NFG has one shale well while Cabot Oil and Gas (COG), I think, has around 100. This is kind of interesting given the fact that NFG is the incumbent player in the region.

Bottom line, I see a lot of similarities between NFG and Questar (STR) at the beginning of its transformation...the STR story has turned out really well, so let's see what NFG can do to create more value for shareholders.