Liam Denning, Columnist

Winter Is Still Coming for U.S. Gas Exporters

An unfamiliar euphoria grips the industry now, but long-term trends haven’t changed.

January 15, 2021 at 12:00 PM UTC

Liam Denning is a Bloomberg Opinion columnist covering energy. A former banker, he edited the Wall Street Journal’s Heard on the Street column and wrote the Financial Times’s Lex column.

Cooking with gas, for now.
Photographer: Christopher Furlong/Getty Images Europe

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The Asian gas market right now can only be described as euphoric. Earlier this week, a cargo of liquefied natural gas changed hands at almost $40 per million BTU, the equivalent of paying $235 for a barrel of oil. Having traded at $2 in the summer, futures for the Japan-Korea Marker, or JKM, benchmark price are up eight-fold.

Euphoria is an unfamiliar feeling in gas, where excess supply and lower prices have crushed spirits, not least in the shale-swamped U.S. But the price-spike, spreading now to Europe, has rekindled hopes that a drop-off in supply projects, combined with recovery from Covid-19, portend a new growth phase.