[masonic]

California utilities are just pass-through delivery agents for natural gas -- they just charge cost + % to service. Gas prices can vary greatly depending on demand.

What the current push against consumer access to natural gas ignores is that there is a lot of natural gas produced as a byproduct of producing other oil drilling products, and if not consumed for useful purposes it just gets burned off into the atmosphere directly.

[Kim_Bruning]

Coming from the gas starved Europe of 2022 [1], I am somewhat discombobulated by the fact that someone can still be so calm and detached about natural gas! So I went and looked at some numbers.

It turns out that the USA hasn't felt the current natural gas situation as much because it's a major natural gas exporter itself, and likely maintains large strategic reserves besides.

Still, even in the US, at very least the price on the futures market has roughly doubled if we take say 2019/2020 as the baseline. [2]

[1] In eg Netherlands and Germany the majority of homes use natural gas for heating. Due to a combination of Covid instabilities and the Ukraine war, consumer gas prices have reached record highs. Different sources quote different ratios [3] but I could pin one source down on claiming a factor of 5* compared to a couple of years ago.

[2] https://tradingeconomics.com/commodity/natural-gas.

[3] Depending on if you factor in government compensation, whether it's a projection or a spot price, etc. And I can understand people wanting to hedge their reporting a bit, because the numbers are a little crazy right now.