NATION Natural-gas prices surge as production lags
Prices are at their highest ever for this time of year.
WASHINGTON POST
After last winter's bitter cold and painfully high heating bills, consumers were hoping for a break this spring from record natural-gas prices.
It hasn't happened. Sluggish gas production throughout the United States is straining to keep up with demand, and wholesale natural-gas prices have hovered around $6 for 1,000 cubic feet this month. That's the highest level ever for this time of year, twice the average price in 2002 and equivalent to a $35 price on a barrel of oil.
The current high gas prices will raise consumers' heating bills again next winter because utilities need to fill underground storage reservoirs this spring and summer to ensure enough supply when cold weather returns.
Gas inventories are 38 percent below the average for the past five years, drained by last winter's heavy demands for the fuel and stagnant gas production.
Additional impact
Electricity customers will suffer, too, if severe heat waves strike this summer. More than 90 percent of the power plants built since the beginning of electricity deregulation in the late 1990s run on natural gas, and that is the primary fuel for producing peak power supplies when air-conditioning demand soars.
Gas companies trying to fill storage may wind up competing with generators trying to avoid blackouts, says David Parker, chief executive of the American Gas Association. "When both of them are going at it in the summer -- as they may be -- prices will go up."
The situation may persist. "For the next two or three years, we are going to be in a very tight supply-demand situation," said Craig Shere, securities analyst with Standard & amp; Poor's Investment Advisory Services.
Tight supplies leave the gas market vulnerable to huge price spikes from trading manipulation, as federal investigations into the 2000-01 California energy crisis have found, or when drastic weather conditions suddenly drive up demand, as happened this winter.
Experts don't agree on how severe the natural-gas shortage is or how long it will last.
More drilling
John Wood, a director of the federal Energy Information Administration in Dallas, said high gas prices are once again encouraging producers to drill wells and boost production.
"The increase in rigs will accelerate, in all likelihood," Wood said.
The number of gas-drilling rigs in operation in this country stood at 795 in April, up 30 percent in the past year and closer to the 2001 record of more than 1,000, according to the Baker Hughes Inc. oil-field services company.
"We can get back to 1,000 [rigs], and if we do, we'll be building up surpluses pretty solidly," Wood said.
Production dropping?
But energy consultant Michael Zenker says there are signs that gas production from fields along the Gulf Coast that have been the cornerstone of gas supplies for decades are petering out.
"Even a robust level of drilling won't add enough to production," said Zenker, a senior director at Cambridge Energy Research Associates.
Natural-gas producers along the gulf and in the midcontinent area may be facing the same turning point that hit Texas oil producers in the 1970s, when two Middle East crises sent oil prices soaring.
Back then, drillers rushed rigs into the field but couldn't increase production. Texas oil output peaked in the 1970s and has been declining ever since, Zenker said.
"We're really about at that inflection point in North America for gas," Zenker said.