Canuck,
The free market laws of supply and demand sometimes work in your favor! Recent advances in drilling technology have made it profitable to extract the massive reserves of NG that were previously uneconomical to produce. The economics that surround oil and gas markets are complex, and I personally find the subject quite interesting. Over the past few years, crude oil has jumped in price while NG has plummeted. Oil prices have increased mostly due to world political issues, while NG prices have fallen due to technology developments.
Eventually, NG prices will settle-out a bit higher than they currently are, while oil prices will settle-out much lower than they currently are. The only real use for crude oil is for transportation fuels like gasoline, diesel and jet fuel. On the other hand, there are lots of uses for NG, such as electrical power generation, as feedstocks for chemical and plastics production, or for production of agricultural fertilizers.
Enjoy that cheap NG while it lasts. North American supplies are projected to run out sometime in the next 150 years.
slider
I'm familiar with the O&G market - my livelihood is tied directly to it. I work with one eye on rig counts and the other on market pricing. Here's what I'm absolutely certain of: supply and demand has little to do with the pricing of commodities in a speculator's market. I used to pay in excess of $12, now I'm paying $3 (NG). The $12 was in large part due to positions taken by the Amaranth hedge fund and the hedge fund that bet against them. That was a $2billion bust and wiped out Amaranth and a few others.
Goldman-Sachs has a "special exception" from the SEC that lets them trade on the CBOE despite them not taking delivery of the commodities they're speculating in. Their foray into CBOE speculation drove oil prices over $140/barrel at a time when there was a
glut of oil in the marketplace. To begin to detail how badly broken the supply-and-demand equation is perverted and broken would be a PhD in itself.
In the meantime, I will continue to enjoy the absurdly low price of NG energy.