Is the commodity price of natural gas heading up? Heading down? Depends on who you ask. Lately, it seems the overwhelming consensus is the price will go higher starting early next year, and indeed prices have been up recently from their historic 10-year lows (right now the NYMEX price is $3.25 Mbtus, it was just $1.90 not long ago). Natural gas is a commodity, and like any commodity, price is determined by supply and demand. If there’s more supply with steady demand, that equals lower prices.
A new article by Bloomberg (a perennially anti-drilling news service) predicts prices will go lower again—soon—because new Marcellus pipelines are coming online by the end of this year that will add an additional 30% capacity to supplies in the marketplace. How low will they go? One analyst quoted says prices may head back to the $2 range:
