Who Says You Can’t Go Home – How Much Gas Demand Growth Will Come from Within the Northeast?

As the Marcellus/Utica quickly became the U.S.’s premier natural gas production region in the 2010s, a larger portion of its output headed out of the Northeast. Existing pipelines were reversed, new pipelines were built, and gas found its way to markets in the Midwest, Gulf Coast, Southeast and Canada. A smaller yet increasingly important part of the Northeast gas story, however, has involved greater demand for gas from within the Northeast, as coal plants shuttered and gas-fired power plants largely took their place. This growth has been threatened recently by plans to shift the electric sector to greater reliance on renewables, but the emergence of data centers has the potential to lift all energy consumption beyond current levels. In today’s RBN blog, we will discuss the future of gas demand in the Northeast and whether the data center boom will outrun the decline of fossil fuels’ share in the energy mix and lead to overall growth.

To see which way natural gas demand is headed in the Northeast, we will first take a look back at the recent past. For reference, our definition of “Northeast” in this blog matches the one laid out in Wake Me Up and used consistently in our weekly NATGAS Appalachia report: the 14 states comprising Virginia, West Virginia, Ohio and every state to the north and east of them. States in this region contain a wide variety of profiles from a natural gas perspective. Pennsylvania, West Virginia and Ohio are the heavy-hitters of gas production, while the six New England states, New Jersey, Maryland and Delaware have almost no natural gas production; Virginia’s production is relatively modest and New York produces a tiny amount. All 14 states are consumers of natural gas — though Vermont’s comes exclusively from Canada — and their consumption patterns have evolved over the previous decades in ways that impact the gas market today.

Over the past 15 years, total consumption of natural gas in the Northeast from the four main sectors of consumer demand (residential, commercial, industrial and power) has increased by 46%. Last year, consumption in the Northeast states averaged 20.1 Bcf/d, a record high. As shown in Figure 1 below, consumption growth has been persistent. From 2010 to 2015, consumption in the main four sectors rose by 17%, but the increase was a much smaller 9% between 2015 and 2020. However, gas demand picked up the pace from 2020 to last year, rising by 14%.