LNG Export Outage Helping US Prices

The June 8, 2022 explosion and fire at the FREEPORT LNG export terminal in Quintana, Texas, dropped the Henry Hub commodity price for natural gas, from $9.34 two days before the incident to $7.26 a week later, a huge 23% price drop. Conversely, LNG prices in Europe and Britain rose nearly that much, spiking with a 21% price increase.

What was once thought to be a 3-month outage at the Texas LNG facility, is now forecast to last 6-months — the end of 2022. Depending which side of the Atlantic natural gas users are on, that’s either good news or bad news.

This morning, the Henry Hub commodity price was $7.89, which is still over 15% lower than pre-incident. The Henry Hub commodity price for natural gas had been experiencing a meteoric rise, tripling over the past year, and skyrocketing a whopping 5-times its commodity price from two years ago. These price increases are shadowing ever-increasing LNG exports, as seen in the EIA graph above.

At the same time, we read about oil-rich Texas being bailed out during their recent heat wave by renewables — wind and solar. You don’t need tea leaves, or a hyped-up oil and gas executive, to see clearly where our future lies, and it’s definitely not with finite fossil fuels that pollute our air, land and water.

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