Demand for Texas Natural Gas is going up - June 10

[dan_s]

Texas is pumping natural gas out of the ground and exporting it at a record pace. It may only be the start of another energy boom for the Lone Star State because natural gas demand is growing both globally and at home.

Texas produced 34.1 billion cu ft daily of natural gas in March, newly released figures from the Texas Oil and Gas Association showed this week. The association forecast that by May, this will have grown to 34.4 billion cu ft daily. More than half of the March total was exported, at 12.5 billion cu ft daily, with the rest being consumed domestically.

More natural gas will need to be consumed domestically in the coming years, however, thanks to Big Tech’s artificial intelligence ambitions. The topic is as hot as they come: AI data center operators are scrambling to find enough reliable electricity supply for their facilities. Wind and solar can’t cut it, so the companies are going the nuclear path or, as it happens, the natural gas path.

A senior Amazon executive admitted earlier this year the technology sector will continue needing hydrocarbon energy for a while yet. Meta essentially admitted that talk about buying electricity from wind and solar operators is cheap; reliably powering data centers requires baseload generation that gas and nuclear can generate—and nuclear takes ages to build.

Despite the hype around small modular reactors, the world’s nuclear energy currently comes from the large sort, and building a large-reactor nuclear facility takes a long time to construct. Gas-fired power plants, on the other hand, can be built rather quickly, which is going to drive natural gas demand further—and so will rising exports.

Read more: https://oilprice.com/Energy/Natural-Gas/Natural-Gas-Boom-to-Heat-Up-in-Texas.html