US

The incredible growth in U.S. LNG export capacity over the past few years has been facilitated by a mostly predictable federal permitting process. It may sometimes be slower than developers like and leave them more open to pushback at the state and local level, but LNG export projects that enter the federal permitting process with both the Department of Energy (DOE) and the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission (FERC) are generally granted their authorizations and export licenses. And once they have them, they’ve been able to hold onto them — until now. Both FERC and the DOE had been granting extensions to these permits as their authorization windows were closing, meaning that projects that were authorized a decade ago and still not online have retained their authorizations and export licenses. But with a DOE rule change announced April 21, the era of repeatedly renewing authorizations appears to be over. The DOE is sending a clear message to LNG developers: Get your project across the finish line in a timely manner or get out of the way and make space for someone who can. In today’s RBN blog, we take a closer look at the DOE rule change and its impact on LNG projects currently under development.

As the new heating season in North America gets under way, the natural gas sector in Canada, the U.S., and even globally, is experiencing a surge in gas prices to levels unseen in many years. In Canada and the U.S., you would have to go way back to 2008-09 to find the most recent instance of $5/MMBtu-plus gas heading into a heating season. As for the rest of the world, it has never experienced prices at the levels reported in the past few months — north of $30/MMBtu in some places. The big question, as always, is: where do we go from here? In today’s RBN blog, we review our 2021 pricing outlook for Canadian gas and discuss our forecast for 2022.

For six months, European natural gas prices skyrocketed higher almost every day. The soaring prices made sense. Gas inventories in Europe were low following higher-than-normal demand last winter. Economies were recovering from COVID-19. Russia was curtailing gas deliveries. It all added up to a likely supply shortage during the winter of 2021-22. And the market did what markets do: anticipate. Even though the next winter season was months away, gas buyers went to work, stocking up on supplies like squirrels gathering nuts. The more prices increased, the more panic buying kicked in. By last Tuesday, October 5, the European TTF price was up more than 5X what it had been on May 1. Then, on Wednesday, a few comments from Vladimir Putin seemed to pop the bubble, and within a few days the Dutch TTF price was down 27%. Is everything OK now? Was the gas-price run-up all just speculative buying and short covering? Or is a supply crunch still on the horizon, and this is just the calm before the storm? In today’s RBN blog, we explore those questions.