Winter's Coming

Image Source: https://www.moneycontrol.com/

By Ethan Price

September 19th, 2021

As the summer season comes to a close, many in the US will start preparing ourselves mentally for the cool fall, and eventually, the rigged winter months. However, the price of natural gas has decided that winter will be starting a tad bit sooner. Natural gas futures have been rising over the past 6 months, jumping 17% in just September alone. As of Friday September 19th, futures sit at $4.99. According to the Wall Street Journal, “[natural gas] prices haven’t climbed so high since blizzards froze the Northeast in early 2014”. Although this may be a crazy feat, the price of natural gas should still only go up as winter approaches.

While analysts are not exactly certain on what may have caused this early spike, they do have a few speculations. Over this past year, freezing temperatures in Texas caused many wells to freeze over, while in the Western part of the country, drought dried up hydro power production. Moreover, Hurricane Ida forced nearly all gas output offline in the Gulf of Mexico. It seems as if all these events combined have led to some sort of shortage of gas heading into Winter 2022.