First, the good news from a panel discussing natural gas finances at the recent IHS CERAWeek conference in Houston:

“The current problems are probably, over the long run, the best thing that could have happened to gas in some sense,” said Alastair Maxwell, managing director for Goldman Sachs. “The real challenge for the business at hand is cost and economics.”

See? This is good for us. Would you like some cod liver oil to go with that second helping of low commodity prices?

Duncan Caird, managing director and head of project and export finance, Americas, for HSBC Securities, offered a laundry list of items to address:

“We’ve seen the price of equity completely change, so people are going to have to reprice how they do that—on LNG, on pipelines, on terminals,” he said. “We will see overall cost probably go up. We then need to look at the synthetic form of cost to capital, which is, what is the cost of my steel, my unions, my labor, the technology that I’m bringing to it? And those things all need to improve.”

The transaction list this month tilts toward generation of funds, with only one acquisition: Summit Midstream Partners LLC’s $1.2 billion dropdown of operating assets to Summit Midstream Partners LP. The general partner will receive an initial payment of $360 million, with a deferred payment due in 2020.

Repaying debt is the stated purpose of the cash infusion for several companies listed below. A conservative capital structure is a necessary component of managing through the downcycle and ultimately, as they say, it’s good for us.

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