The fundamentals of the natural gas market have never been better, but the continued buildout of midstream infrastructure remains critical to meeting supply-and-demand needs in the coming years, a trio of industry experts said during a panel discussion Wednesday at RBN’s GasCon 2026 conference in Houston.
Sital Mody, President of Natural Gas Pipelines at Kinder Morgan, said pipeline developments will need to focus on three things in the coming years – unlocking supply, building new infrastructure and debottlenecking problem areas, and increasing ways to reach the end-user market. If those challenges can be met, he said, big things are ahead.
“When I take a step back and reflect on the natural gas industry, the one thing that comes to mind for me is all gas, no brakes,” he said.
Danielle Bertoldi, a technical adviser at the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission (FERC) emphasized that better gas-electric coordination has become a much-bigger priority, a lesson learned that hard way during 2021’s Winter Storm Uri.
“What used to be very siloed sectors, the electric sector and the gas sector, designed very differently … we’re at the point now where you can’t really differentiate between the two industries, you have to consider them together if you want to maintain reliability for the U.S. grid,” she said.
Gas storage (see map below) is becoming an increasingly important part of the supply-demand mix, especially as U.S. LNG exports are poised to increase sharply in the next few years. Dave Marchese, CEO of Caliche Storage, said a single LNG train that trips offline could divert up to 1 Bcf/d of natural gas to storage.
