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Strategies & Market Trends : Bosco & Crossy's stock picks,talk area -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Crossy who wrote (34175)	3/22/2009 7:32:54 PM
From: Michael Young	Respond to of 37387

World drowning in natural gas: nytimes.com "Natural Gas, Suddenly Abundant, Is Cheaper By CLIFFORD KRAUSS Published: March 20, 2009 HOUSTON — The decline in crude oil prices gets all the headlines, but the first globalized natural gas glut in history is driving an even more drastic collapse in the cost of gas that cooks food, heats homes and runs factories in the United States and many other countries. Six giant plants capable of cooling and liquefying gas for export are due to come on line this year just as the economies of the Asian and European countries that import the most gas to run their industries are slowing. Energy experts and company executives say that means loads of gas from Qatar, Egypt, Nigeria and Algeria that otherwise would be going to Japan, Korea, Taiwan and Spain are beginning to arrive in supertankers in the United States, even though there is a gas glut here, too. With industrial and utility use of natural gas declining, gas prices in the United States have already declined by two-thirds since the summer. Prices are not likely to go down much more, experts say, but an increase in imports is likely to keep them low until the global economy recovers and drives demand back up. That is good news for American consumers and many businesses, since gas provides about a fifth of the power generated by electric utilities and is a vital component for fertilizers, plastics and other industrial products. But it is bad news for proponents of energy independence, who cheered the boom in domestic gas drilling and production over the last four years. Gas industry executives expect that liquefied gas imports into the United States will at least triple in the second half of this year. That comes as domestic producers have lowered their rig count in natural gas fields around the country by 50 percent in the last several months because of the fall in prices, leading to an expected drop in production by the end of the year. Normally a decline in production would result in a rising gas price, leading to an eventual recovery in drilling. But energy executives say that increasing imports will probably delay a recovery in production, which until now depended almost entirely on national market forces . . ."