The Coming Natural Gas Price Train Wreck

Natural gas prices don’t have the “big sign on every corner” public awareness, but they’re up big time too, according to the EIA:

Current prices in all parts of country exceed historical records for this time of year, when moderate temperatures lead to significantly lower aggregate demand and result in additional supplies injected into storage for later in the year.

Imported liquid natural gas was supposed to be the fix for that, but the LNG thing isn’t going so well, according to an article by Clifford Krauss in today’s New York Times:

Only a month after Cheniere Energy inaugurated its $1.4 billion liquefied natural gas terminal here, an empty supertanker sat in its berth with no place to go while workers painted empty storage tanks.

The nearly idle terminal is a monument to a stalled experiment, one that was supposed to import so much L.N.G. from around the world that homes would be heated and factories humming at bargain prices.