Natural gas price spikes are here to stay

The industry's trying to put blame elsewhere is based on some royal BS.

Already, the natural gas industry and its backers have begun casting blame on others for the gas market’s upheaval, suggesting that consumers hold the industry’s proposed villains responsible for the industry’s price issues.

In reality, a wide range of factors — starting with a blast of LNG exports that now consumes roughly 10 percent of the United States’s total gas production — have launched prices higher in the U.S. And shale drillers themselves have proved reluctant to drill more wells even as prices lurch up — a fact that stems far more from drillers’ own wild overspending during the shale rush (and the resulting wave of bankruptcies and cratered stocks) than from anything related to, say, proposed-but-not-implemented climate policies or a small but growing shift to renewable power...

Attempts to pin the blame for natural gas price swings on renewables drew immediate pushback from the International Energy Agency (IEA). “Recent increases in global natural gas prices are the result of multiple factors,” IEA Executive Director Fatih Birol said in a September 21 statement, “and it is inaccurate and misleading to lay the responsibility at the door of the clean energy transition.”

The reality too is that natural gas has long suffered from wild price swings and volatility that — while tamped down in the recent past by the shale gas glut — just might be re-emerging into a pandemic-pressured world. - DeSmog