Natural Gas Imports: From Russia, with Love?

Michael Giberson

Well, maybe not “with love,” but as Platts reports, Russian LNG could arrive in the U.S. as early as this Winter. (HT to NewsWatch: Energy.)  Of course with the ongoing natural gas glut, that LNG may find itself “all compressed up with no place to go.”  The WSJ Environmental Capital blog notes that underground storage is being filled up, pressure is rising in long-distance gas pipelines and gathering systems, and sooner or later production will have to be cut. (See current EIA gas storage data here.)

A Bloomberg item reports that the natural gas “mid majors” that have been increasing output the fastest have tended to outperform investor expectations, perhaps offering an incentive to keep production up. The article also notes that exploration budgets have been cut, so the current oversupply should tend to come back into balance. See also here and here.

That is, of course, if the U.S. market isn’t flooded with LNG.

(RELATED: For more on Russian LNG and the Russia-ExxonMobil relationship, see the Streetwise Professor.)

2 thoughts on “Natural Gas Imports: From Russia, with Love?”

  1. If the price falls far enough, we can use a lot of natural gas for electricity generation- by shutting down coal plants and running peaking turbines for baseload.

    But there are rumors that the US Nat Gas ETF (UNG) is holding up prices, stimulating overporduction and underconsumption.

  2. Pingback: Import? Export? Which way for LNG in North America? « Knowledge Problem

Comments are closed.