Columbia Gas M-U Trading Hub Now Untethered from NYMEX
The price of natural gas traded at the Henry Hub (HH) in Southern Louisiana is THE benchmark price used for the entire industry in the U.S. All other prices are compared to the HH. The HH serves as the official delivery location for futures contracts on the New York Mercantile Exchange (NYMEX). The hub is owned by Sabine Pipe Line LLC and has access to many of the major gas markets in the United States, hence its use as the benchmark. A major trading hub in the Marcellus/Utica, Columbia Gas, tended to follow the HH, rising when HH went up and falling when HH lost value. It’s never a one-to-one correlation, but it’s close. That is, until the past year, when, according to analysts with Argus Media, the Columbia Gas trading hub became “untethered” from the HH.
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Price volatility is how much and how fast a price, like the NYMEX futures price of natural gas at the Henry Hub, changes. How much the price “swings” up or down, and how suddenly, is a measure of volatility. In 2022, when the price of natgas spiked to new multi-year highs, it did so quickly. The price in 2022 also came down about as quickly as it rose, meaning extreme volatility. Since early 2022, NYMEX prices, in general, along with volatility, have settled down. The extreme price swings are gone — at least for now. Sadly, higher prices for natgas are also gone for now.
According to Bloomberg News, commodities traders are “bracing for a record-smashing summer that will shake up commodities.” Bloomberg falsely states that people around the world “are already living through the havoc brought on by global temperatures that are breaking records.” Bloomberg ominously warns, “It’s about to get a lot worse.” Nothing sells like bad news, even if the bad news is blatantly false. In a hilarious statement in the same article, Bloomberg attributes high inflation under Joementia to global warming. Talk about sleazy and sick. Based on assumptions that Mom Earth will toast this summer, Bloomberg predicts natgas prices will jump by 50% this summer, to $4/MMBtu, because of all the extra electricity required for air conditioning.
In a companion post today, we brought you Bloomberg’s prediction of $4 natgas this summer based on the false premise of wild, scorching heat from man-made global warming. Whatever. This post contains predictions by analysts with J.P. Morgan for the price of natural gas for the rest of this year and into 2025. J.P. Morgan’s predictions are grounded in reality, not wild speculation like Bloomberg’s. J.P. Morgan predicts the Henry Hub price to average $2.88 per million British thermal units (MMBtu) in 2024 and $4.75 per MMBtu in 2025. They break it down quarter by quarter…
The NYMEX futures price for natural gas has been trending higher lately. It closed down a nickel on Friday, but overall, the trend has been up, up, and away. Since price is so important, we cover the topic frequently. Lately, we’ve made the following points (in various posts): (1) Natural gas production is declining, thanks to drillers like EQT, Chesapeake, and Antero curtailments. (2) LNG export demand is increasing with Freeport back online and a couple of new plants coming online soon. Both of those factors combine to drive the price higher. However, there’s another factor at work to keep prices lower.
Have you noticed? The NYMEX price of natural gas has been on an upward trend over the past week or so. We’ve actually broken the $2 barrier, and it continues to climb. Which begs the question, why? There are typically a number of factors combined to drive the price. This time around, we think we can boil it down to a classic economics principle — there’s more demand and less supply. The demand is coming from the problem-plagued Freeport LNG facility, which is rockin’ and rollin’ once again. Lower supply is coming from fewer natgas drilling rigs in operation.
It must be its “predict the future price of natgas” season, along with tax season. Yesterday, we told you that BMI, a Fitch Solutions company, hauled out its crystal ball to make predictions about the “front month” contract price for NYMEX natural gas (based on the Henry Hub) for the next five years, beginning with 2024 (see 
The problem-plagued Freeport LNG export plant remains out of order. The plant had been mostly offline following an episode of cold temps in January (see 
Once a month, the analysts at the U.S. Energy Information Administration (EIA) issue the agency’s Short-Term Energy Outlook (STEO), their best guess about where energy prices and production will go in the next 12 months or so. We sometimes poke good-natured fun at the EIA because their predictions go up in one month, and in the next month, they go down, etc. What about the latest STEO dart board, published on Tuesday? EIA predicts the average spot price for natural gas will be $2.20/MMBtu in 2024. That’s down significantly (17%) from the $2.65 it predicted just two months ago in February’s report (see 
We are currently mired in some of the lowest prices for natural gas in the last 27 years (see