The natural gas market appears to have lost a sense of scale for storage volumes. Prices languish while last week’s EIA figure for gas in storage at the end of injection season, normalized to supply, represents the second lowest on record even as gas demand is poised for a last major surge. From 1975 until 2008, annual dry natural gas production varied oscillated flatly from 44 to 55 Bcf/d for over thirty years before beginning a quiet explosion. By contrast, 2019 will average in the low 90s after growing at a break-neck 11% in 2018 and continuing to grow through this year. This new reality of supply and demand changes the significance of the nearly unchanged gas storage capacity. Storage, of course, buffers seasonal temperatures, and seasonal use has grown only marginally in the last ten years. Storage, however, also buffers the much larger industrial and export demand. That […]