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.