Burnin' For You - The Impact of Coal- and Gas-Fired Generation Shifts on Summer Natural Gas Prices

On the surface, it may seem that the LNG market has normalized after the past year’s tumult, and it’s true that many of the day-to-day disruptions that plagued LNG offtakers and operators have subsided. Mass cargo cancellations are a distant memory, and U.S. LNG exports have been flowing at record levels. Global demand has recovered, and buyers are back to worrying more about what they normally worry about: storage refill and securing enough supply for the next winter. However, in other ways, the pandemic and the more decisive shift toward decarbonization measures in many ways have fundamentally changed how deals for future LNG development will get done. Today, we look at what the global initiative to reduce greenhouse gas emissions will mean for LNG project financing.

Despite the highest natural gas futures prices in over a decade, its use for power generation in the Lower 48 has set records in recent months. This is in part by design: economics and environmental regulation have broadly favored gas-fired plants and pushed into retirement hundreds of coal-fired plants in the last decade or so, reducing price-driven fuel-switching capabilities between the two fuels. However, there’s more to it than that: a tight coal market, marked by low stockpiles, high export demand and record high prices, is limiting gas-to-coal switching even further, making gas burn for power much more inelastic to price. In today’s RBN blog, we take a closer look at this key intersection of the gas and coal markets.

The CME/NYMEX Henry Hub prompt natural gas futures prices have been relatively rangebound this injection season and have averaged around $2.60/MMBtu since June — a third or less of where prices stood during the same period last year, in the $7-$9/MMBtu range, and at or below most natural gas producers’ breakeven costs. Yet, this is a much rosier scenario than it could have been considering that the first quarter of 2023 was one of the most bearish in over a decade and led to a massive storage surplus vs. last year that persisted through much of the summer. Since setting the year-to-date monthly average low of $2.19/MMBtu in April, prompt futures rose to an average of nearly $2.50/MMBtu in June, ~$2.65/MMBtu in July and August, and have mostly stayed in the $2.50-$2.75 range in September to date. In today’s RBN blog, we break down the factors that kept prices from unraveling this injection season to date and the implications for the rest of the shoulder season.