NEW YORK – Natural gas prices fell 7 percent on Thursday after a report showed U.S. stockpiles of the fuel reached a record 3.589 trillion cubic feet last week, Bloomberg News reported.
The Energy Department said the nation’s inventory of natural gas last week surpassed the previous record of 3.545 trillion cubic feet set in November 2007.
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Stockpiles are not expected to fall until colder weather raises demand next month, which means it could approach the nation’s storage capacity limit of 3.899 trillion cubic feet, the Energy Department said.
“In the near term, the gas market is oversupplied with a fair amount of question marks,” Tom Orr, research director at brokerage Weeden & Co. in Greenwich, Conn., told Bloomberg. “There’s a healthy dose of skepticism. We had weak consumer confidence data and manufacturing data.”
Gas futures fell 7 percent, or 34.1 cents, to $4.50 per million British thermal units in early afternoon trading on the New York Mercantile Exchange. Prices have fallen 42 percent in the past year and are 67 percent below the record high of $13.694 per million Btu set in July 2008.
Rhode Island generates nearly all of its electricity using natural gas, and 46 percent of residents used it to heat their homes at the start of this decade, according to the Energy Department. The state gets its natural gas supply via pipelines from the Gulf Coast and storage sites in the Appalachian Basin region.
