Save for later Print Download Share LinkedIn Twitter The bottom fell out of US gas futures Thursday as the August contract plunged $1.074, or 16.5%, to settle at $5.424 per million Btu – the lowest prompt-month close since late March. A much bigger-than-expected storage injection precipitated the sell-off mid-morning as the market “priced in the full impacts of a heavy reduction in the storage deficit to the five-year average,” Gelber & Associates analyst Shomik Sen told Energy Intelligence. Also Thursday, federal pipeline regulators said they found unsafe conditions at the Freeport LNG terminal in Texas and won’t approve a restart until an outside review is conducted. Freeport, offline since Jun. 8 after a fire, has said it hopes to restart in early September, but the findings cast doubt on that assumption, and Freeport late in the day said it now expects restart to begin in early October. The outage has cut roughly 2 billion cubic feet per day of gas demand. The 12-month strip fell 84.5¢ to $5.086; the 2023 strip was down 53.6¢ to $4.694 (Futures contracts).
