A huge shortage of natural gas is preventing a recovery from the cold weather that has left millions of people powerless in the midst of the nation.
Natural gas production in the United States has fallen by about 20% in the past week, a rapid decline caused by frozen oil and gas wells and pipeline infrastructure in Texas and other states. In Texas, which produces about a quarter of the country’s gas, production has fallen by more than 30 percent, and some of the largest power plant operators say they have struggled to get enough gas.
Texas is beginning to thaw from the worst winter storm in a generation, and the state’s main network operator has said it has restored power to most homes. Just under 500,000 electricity customers across the country had no electricity since Thursday morning, which dropped sharply from four million earlier this week, according to PowerOutage.US data. CenterPoint Energy Inc., the company that supplies energy for most of the Houston area, said it restored power to all but about 31,000 customers by Thursday morning, compared to more than a million customers at the start. of the week.
But analysts say the gas shortage could persist for weeks as producers and pipeline operators struggle to resume operations. Luke Jackson, an analyst at S&P Global Platts, said the supply shortfall may be higher than estimated due to a lack of publicly available data from Texas’ intra-state pipelines that do not report gas volumes.
US natural gas production has fallen from about 92 billion cubic meters a day to about 72 billion in the last week, according to S&P Global Platts. During the same period, national gas demand peaked at about 152 billion cubic meters per day as part of the country increased the heat in their homes.