The Kraken, the monstrous giant squid in Alfred Lord Tennyson’s poem, lies for long ages at the bottom of the ocean in “ancient, dreamless, uninvaded sleep”, until suddenly it wakes and rises roaring to the surface. The US natural gas market has been a bit like that. Since 2009, benchmark Henry Hub gas has averaged about $3.30 per million British Thermal Units, and has only rarely spiked above $5. But this week, the front month futures price went above $8 / mmBTU, for the first time since 2008.
Although gas prices quickly fell back — the futures were back below $7 / mmBTU on Thursday evening — the price spike has highlighted the new dynamics in the market. Changes on both the supply side and the demand side for US gas are combining to reduce flexibility and increase price volatility. There are good reasons to think that the current (relatively) high prices will not last in the long term. But for a while at least, further spikes are definitely possible.
On the demand side, the inflexibility in the market is being created in part by the loss of coal-fired power generation capacity. There has been a wave of shutdowns of coal-fired plants that have reached the end of their economic lives, often hastened by environmental regulations and corporate emissions goals. The US lost an average of 11 gigawatts of coal-fired generation capacity every year between 2015 and 2020.
That means coal is less able to act to put a cap on gas prices. Traditionally, if gas prices rose high enough, generators would switch to burning more coal, bringing the market into balance. The loss of coal capacity means that buffer has been eroded. Low thermal coal stockpiles have weakened it further.
At the same time, North America’s gas market is becoming increasingly connected to the rest of the world. Once largely sealed off in splendid isolation, it has been linked to global trends by the growth of LNG imports since Cheniere Energy shipped its first cargo from Sabine Pass Louisiana in 2016. When the global gas market is oversupplied, as it was in the summer of 2020, US LNG exports drop, driving down prices in North America.
When global markets are tight, as they are today, US LNG exporters run at full capacity. That has been stoking concerns about whether gas in storage in the US will be adequate going into next winter, contributing to the upward pressure on prices, says Eugene Kim, a research director on Wood Mackenzie’s Americas gas team.
On the supply side, meanwhile, producers’ responses to high prices are being constrained in many cases by companies’ commitments to maintaining capital discipline, paying down debt and returning cash to investors. There was a good example of this last week from Comstock Resources, which produces gas in the Haynesville Shale. It is generating free cash at current gas prices, even though it has hedged about 50% of its production. It is planning a steep reduction in its debt, from 3.8 times adjusted earnings in 2020 to 1.5 times this year, and announced last week that it would use some of its cash flow to redeem US$245 million of 7.5% senior notes, due 2025. Once its leverage ratio target has been achieved, the company says, it will aim to return capital to shareholders. Meanwhile it is planning for average overall production growth of roughly 2-7% this year.
That capital discipline among E&P companies means that US gas production this month is running only about 3% higher than in April 2021.
The reason to think that current market conditions will be time limited is that the US still has very large gas reserves that can be produced at relatively low cost. “What sets the long-term price of US gas fundamentally is the marginal gas molecule required to be brought into the marketplace to meet demand,” Eugene Kim says. “Blessed with plentiful low-cost gas resources, the fundamental price of Henry Hub is closer to $3/mmBTU, rather than the current market prices that have been as high as $8/mmBTU.”
Still, now the gas market has been woken up, it may be a while before it goes back to sleep again. The availability of coal as an alternative to gas is only going to decline. The US today has about 200 gigawatts of coal-fired generation capacity. Wood Mackenzie forecasts that by 2030, that will have dropped to only about 90 GW. Over the same period, wind and solar power are expected to grow rapidly, creating a threat of additional gas market imbalances caused by variations in their output. Investments to help manage gas price volatility, including underground storage, may look increasingly attractive.
inbrief
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Source: Wood Mackenzie