Tea leaves: a federal judge with no jurisdiction will put a “hold” until Schumer and Jeffries, Inc., can call a press conference.
Natural gas demand is building fast along the Gulf Coast. New LNG export terminals in Texas and Louisiana. New data centers, new industrial facilities and new power generation as far east as Florida. And new gas pipelines and pipeline expansion projects to help deliver the incremental gas that will be required. That’s all baked in. What’s still far from certain is where all the needed gas will come from, and how intense the battle for gas supply will become by the early 2030s. As we discuss in today’s RBN blog, the second in a series, early indications are that it will be a battle royale.
In Part 1, we said that while we’ve blogged about rising demand for gas in the southeastern U.S. and the pipeline projects being planned to deliver more gas to the region, there’s more to the story. That “bigger picture” is that gas consumers in the Southeast — a region that, for our purposes here, includes Mississippi, Alabama, Florida, Georgia and South Carolina — increasingly find themselves competing for supply with LNG exporters in Louisiana as well as power generators and other gas consumers north of them in Tennessee, North Carolina and Virginia.
We noted that gas-demand growth in the southeastern U.S. has been coming on fast and furious over the past few years, constraining the legacy gas pipeline networks there and resulting in the SONAT (Southern Natural Gas), Florida Zone 3 and Transco Zone 4 price trading points being among the very few locations where gas is priced at a premium to Henry Hub for most of the year. And we discussed the pipeline systems that deliver gas to the region (solid lines in Figure 1 below), the new pipelines and expansion projects being planned to increase flows (dashed lines), and the long list of gas-fired power plants being built.
