A massive shortage of natural gas is standing in the way of recovery from the devastating cold snap that left millions of people without power in the belly of the country.
Natural gas production in the US is down about 20% in the past week, a rapid decline due to frozen oil and gas wells and pipeline infrastructure in Texas and other states. In Texas, which produces about a quarter of the country’s gas, production is down more than 30%, and some of the largest power plant operators say they have struggled to get enough gas.
Texas is starting to thaw from the worst winter storm in a generation, and the state’s major grid operator said it has restored power to most homes. According to data from PowerOutage.US, approximately 365,000 electricity customers nationwide were without power on Thursday afternoon, a sharp drop from four million earlier this week. CenterPoint Energy Inc., the company that supplies power to most of the Houston area, said it had restored all power by Thursday afternoon, save for about 20,000 customers, from more than a million customers earlier this week.
But analysts say the natural gas shortage could linger for weeks as producers and pipeline operators rush to restart operations. Some producers said it could take a week or more for their gas production to fully recover. Luke Jackson, an analyst with S&P Global Platts, said the supply shortage could be greater than estimated, due to a lack of publicly available data from intra-state pipelines in Texas, which does not report gas volumes.
According to data from S&P Global Platts, natural gas production in the US has fallen from about 92 billion cubic feet per day to about 72 billion in the last week. During the same period, national gas demand rose to about 152 billion cubic feet per day at its peak as some of the land increased heat in their homes.