LNG

The US Government forecasts increases in liquefied natural gas exports as well as higher benchmark Henry Hub natural gas prices and a rise in the Brent crude oil price in early 2025, while outlining working gas storage expectations at end of injection season.

Clean Energy Fuels Corp., the US producer of natural gas made from waste and a supplier of LNG fuel at over 600 filling stations around North America, has expanded its network near its base in Southern California.

Dominion Energy has closed the $4.3 billion sale of its Salt Lake City, Utah-based natural gas utility Questar Gas Company and its gas supply company Wexpro to North American pipelines operator Enbridge Inc. of Canada.

The American Gas Association said the state of Nebraska’s state legislature became the 26th state to pass fuel choice legislation in a unanimous and bipartisan vote, securing the protection of energy choice for consumers in a majority of states across the country.

The AGA explained that consumer energy choice preserves access to safe, clean and affordable energy resources including natural gas that offer a sustainable pathway to the shared goal of reducing emissions while maintaining affordability, reliability and quality of life for Americans.

“Thanks to the bipartisan action of now 26 state governments, more than 157 million Americans and 58 million households have a protected choice when it comes to how to fuel their homes and businesses,” said AGA President and CEO Karen Harbert.

Natural gas usage

“The average home using natural gas for space heating, water heating, cooking and clothes drying has about 18 percent lower carbon dioxide emissions than those attributable to an all-electric home, and the average family using natural gas for those purposes saves an average of $1,132 per year,” explained Harbert.

“Over the past 10 years, American families have saved a total of $125 billion thanks to natural gas,” she stated.

“Those are numbers we can be proud of. They also highlight how harmful natural gas bans would be for American families,” Harbert stated.

The AGA represents more than 200 local energy companies that deliver natural gas throughout the US.

There are more than 77 million residential, commercial and industrial natural gas customers in the US, of which 95 percent, or around 73M customers, receive their gas from AGA members.

Fuel choice legislation preserves access to natural gas in homes and businesses in states that have enacted them across America.

Nebraska became the 26th state to pass such a law, joining Idaho, Montana, North Dakota, South Dakota, Wyoming, Utah, Arizona, Kansas, Oklahoma, Texas, Iowa, Missouri, Arkansas, Louisiana, Indiana, Ohio, West Virginia, New Hampshire, Kentucky, Tennessee, North Carolina, Mississippi, Alabama, Georgia and Florida.

Bipartisan moves

“Every state to pass fuel choice legislation has done so in a bipartisan manner,” said the AGA.

“Since 1990, emissions from the natural gas distribution system have declined by 70 percent, even as demand for and usage of natural gas has increased with natural gas served to 23.4 million more consumers and the number of miles of distribution pipeline increasing by 59 percent,” the AGA noted.

US Natural gas is currently 3.3 times more affordable than electricity and expected to remain substantially more cost-efficient through at least to 2050.

“The affordability of natural gas is a critical reason why more than 500,000 families signed up for natural gas space heating, rather than electric heat pumps, over the past five years,” the AGA said.

US Natural gas production is forecast to decline during the coming year and will only increase in 2025, driven by expected higher associated gas output in the Permian Basin of West Texas due to growth in LNG export demand.

Williams Companies, a leading US natural gas pipelines operator with projects aimed at boosting feed-gas supplies for Gulf Coast LNG export plants, has reached an agreement to acquire a portfolio of natural gas storage assets from an affiliate of Hartree Partners LP for $1.95 billion.

European liquefied natural gas price benchmarks declined by over 13 percent this week as supplies were ample and margins widened to over $4 per million British thermal units between the Pacific and Atlantic basin values .

US dry natural gas production has remained at relatively high levels throughout 2023 despite a decline in US natural gas prices with growth driven by the Permian Basin where most of the natural gas is produced from associated gas produced from oil wells.

The United States forecasts an increase in natural gas prices for the summer months of 2023 due to inventories narrowing the surplus to the five-year storage average, though would be much lower than last year’s price of almost $8.00 per million British thermal units in some quarters.

The United States short-term energy outlook for May said that in future it would make use of changed methodology and the new model would combine a 30-year trendline and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s forecast to create the weather forecasts.