No Help for Natural Gas Users

natural gas prices have remained around $6 per 1,000 cubic feet this month.
The current high gas prices will raise consumers' heating bills again next winter because utilities need to fill underground storage reservoirs this spring and summer to ensure enough supply when cold weather returns
Gas inventories are 38 percent below the average for the past five years.

More than 90 percent of the power plants built since the beginning of electricity deregulation in the late 1990s run on natural gas, and that is the primary fuel for producing peak power supplies when air-conditioning demand soars.
High prices may persist. "For the next two or three years, we are going to be in a very tight supply-demand situation,"
"Even a robust level of drilling won't add enough to production," said Zenker, a senior director at Cambridge Energy Research Associates. "We're having a tough enough time keeping up with declines" from maturing fields.
Natural gas producers along the gulf and in the mid-continent area may be facing the same turning point that hit Texas oil producers in the 1970s, when two Middle East crises sent oil prices soaring.

Back then, drillers rushed rigs into the field but couldn't increase production. Texas oil output peaked in the 1970s and has declined since, Zenker said.

"We're really about at that inflection point in North America for gas," Zenker said.
The Cambridge consulting group forecasts that gas prices will remain above $5 per 1,000 cubic feet through most of this decade, raising heating and electricity costs and battering U.S. industries that rely on natural gas as a raw material or energy source, including chemical, aluminum and fertilizer manufacturing.
Dominion, the Richmond-based energy conglomerate, is preparing to reopen a liquefied-gas terminal at Cove Point in lower Maryland, on the Chesapeake Bay. Other projects are under way elsewhere.
Supplies of liquefied gas nationwide could increase by 1 billion cubic feet of gas a day in the next two years, or by more than one-third.

But over the current decade, more liquefied gas won't overcome the combination of declining production from conventional wells and increased demand for gas by power plants, the Cambridge group predicts.