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Tuesday, August 20, 2013

2013 Natural Gas Storage Peak Projection

With about 90 days remaining in injection season, the peak natural gas inventory level is still uncertain.  Weather and prices both will play an important part.  Price, because that determines whether utilities will burn coal or gas at a given power load, and weather because both heating and cooling demand will soon come into play, along with the season risks in the tropics.  In the current era, so much of the offshore infrastructure is storm-resistant that shut-ins are usually brief, and cyclones can suppress air conditioning demand after landfall.

The most recent storage report shows US inventories at 3.006 TCF on August 9th.  Peak storage is usually reached between October 25th and November 22nd.  With increasing uncertainty in distant weeks, here is the current range forecast storage range based on a variety of factors.  Clearly still a wide window.