The Continuing Saga of Northeast Natural Gas Markets

As the producing regions of the Northeast US in the Marcellus and Utica gas plays have exhibited unprecedented growth, essentially dominating much of the natural gas industry's attention in terms of supply and infrastructure, the industry has evolved to the point that “Northeast” in a conversation almost always refers to supply. However, the consuming markets of the Northeast, from Maine to New Jersey, have a much longer history of making headlines in the energy sector. New York City, parts of New Jersey, and all of New England have consistently been short of peak natural gas supply for over 20 years, as power generation demand surged but supply pipelines did not keep pace. In New York, the pipeline capacity into the city was at the brink of supply adequacy in the late 1990s and early 2000s, with any pipeline failure potentially causing a crisis. This issue was somewhat mitigated by the existence of older dual‐fuel generation capacity that could switch to oil during natural gas shortages. Nevertheless, the strain on the system was evident. In New England, the growth of natural gas combined‐cycle plants exploded in the early 2000s within the unregulated independent power producer (IPP) market, fueled by low surplus gas prices during the industry's transition to unbundled markets and unregulated wellhead gas. In 2004, this reached a crisis point when gas prices spiked due to insufficient pipeline capacity, leading IPPs to find their gas more valuable than their power—selling their fuel into the market instead of generating electricity—and causing brownouts.