There’s a horse race among Gulf Coast gas storage developers to provide the tens of billions of cubic feet of incremental space that will be needed by the early 2030s. Out front are the owners of existing salt cavern storage. But which brownfield projects have that special something?
The volumes of Permian natural gas flowing into the Katy area west of Houston will be increasing sharply, as will gas demand from LNG export terminals near the Texas/Louisiana border. Three new pipelines are being developed to move gas from between Katy and the state line, but will they be enough?
The Gulf Coast gas storage market today is a different animal, marked by steeper prices, an emphasis on high injection and withdrawal rates, and a looming capacity shortfall. How did we get here, which market players are shaping things the most, and how much new gas storage is likely to get built?
A natural gas pipeline deal that gives privately held Esentia Energy a complete, start-to-finish link between the Permian Basin and Mexico’s Pacific Coast is highlighting a heretofore under-the-radar LNG project being planned at the end of that now-1,400-mile pipeline system.
Just a few years ago, natural gas storage capacity along the Gulf Coast was widely available at low cost, but that has all changed. A storage-capacity shortfall is looming as new LNG export facilities come online, and the competition among storage developers is heating up. There will be winners and losers.
Massive volumes of natural gas are already converging on the Katy Hub and much more will be soon. A planned bidirectional header system is designed to help ease the flow of gas through that key aggregation and distribution point for gas bound for industrial, power-generation, and LNG export load.
British Columbia is a new hot spot for LNG export development. The first phase of LNG Canada is up and running; Phase 2 is nearing FID. Two smaller LNG export projects are under construction; and a 12-MMtpa (~1.6 Bcf/d) proposal may be sanctioned soon.
LNG Canada didn’t load its first cargo until June 2025, more than nine years after Sabine Pass LNG was up and running in Louisiana. But while the U.S. Gulf Coast had a big head start, Canada is finally firing on all cylinders, with plans to more than triple its LNG export capacity by the early 2030s.
The Haynesville is the nation’s #3 natural gas producer, and close to most of the U.S.’s LNG export capacity. That makes gas pipelines from the Haynesville to the Gulf Coast critically important — and valuable — assets, a reality Williams Cos. just affirmed with its plan to buy Momentum Midstream.
Efforts to develop a new LNG export terminal along the Delaware River near Philadelphia appeared to be going nowhere. But now it seems that Penn America Energy’s moribund plan for such a project has gained new life with a new company name and a new site — in Eddystone Borough, PA.
