Cost of nat gas DOUBLED this month. ---!!

Rectifier · #1 03/25/14, 07:34 PM

Anyone else have this happen to them?

Last month we paid 4.49/GJ which is similar to what we have been paying for years.

This month we paid 9.38/GJ!!!

We have an all time record natural gas bill, obviously! Anyone else have this happen to them? As far as I know, commodity gas is still cheap so we will be changing gas suppliers ASAP.

Man am I ever mad about this

Annsni · #2 03/25/14, 07:39 PM

Uh-oh!! I haven't looked at the bill yet but definitely WILL be looking at it since we have a new high efficiency heating system thanks to our old one going bad and throwing CO in our house a few weeks ago! I'm interested to see how much more efficient this is over our old burner/hot water heater system.

plowjockey · #3 03/25/14, 08:25 PM

Propane doubled in price, so naturally, NG should double in price, too, right?

Thanks to fracking, NG is very plentiful here, but usage is also going way up, so it's not unreasonable to expect prices to eventually rise. they probably just doubled the cost because they can, since demand i high this extremely cold winter.

Hopefully propane and NG will go back down, if the weather ever warms up.

arabian knight · #4 03/25/14, 08:49 PM

Well Propane has already dropped way down form what it had been,
But now some electric plants are switching over from our plentiful coal we have in this country because to he high epa demands and now some are using NG to heat the water for the turbines to turn to make electricity. Thanks epa for making electricity high for over 65% of the country. And going higher yet in years to come.

sammyd · #5 03/25/14, 09:14 PM

welcome to our new greener world...

Alice In TX/MO · #6 03/25/14, 09:34 PM

Maybe a cold winter?

Shygal · #7 03/25/14, 09:40 PM

A cold winter is not a reason to double the price of something. That is price gouging.

Ernie · #8 03/25/14, 09:47 PM

Quote:

Originally Posted by sammyd

welcome to our new greener world...

A lot less green in people's pockets though.

Rectifier · #9 03/25/14, 10:04 PM

Yep I think such dramatic price instability has pretty much pushed me over the edge on that coal boiler that I wanted. I know someone who has a stoker and gets coal delivered by tandem truck - once a year.

Time to go have a chat with him. I always trusted natural gas but if this is the way the markets are going, those days are no more.

Ernie · #10 03/25/14, 10:09 PM

Quote:

Originally Posted by Rectifier

Yep I think such dramatic price instability has pretty much pushed me over the edge on that coal boiler that I wanted. I know someone who has a stoker and gets coal delivered by tandem truck - once a year.

Time to go have a chat with him. I always trusted natural gas but if this is the way the markets are going, those days are no more.

Um, why coal? With the price gouging in NG, haven't you already learned a lesson about being dependent upon on outside source of energy that you can't produce or gather yourself?

rambler · #11 03/25/14, 11:05 PM

Canada has some pipeline issues, actually affected us down here too.

I presume they need the money to fix it back up.

Lp has come back down again here.

Both of these gases are not in short supply; there is a transportation problem, rail cars, pipelines.....

Paul

Yvonne's hubby · #12 03/26/14, 12:02 AM

The price of our gas stabilized several years ago when I got connected to our gas well. The last five years our gas bill has been the same every month..... zip Nada nothing.

Rectifier · #13 03/26/14, 12:18 AM

A coal boiler/stove can burn wood, a wood boiler can't burn coal (too corrosive). If I were to buy one piece of expensive infrastructure it would thus be the coal boiler.

I grew up on the coast heating with wood, it certainly has its charm. But we have a bit of a wood issue called "the prairies" that limits our wood supply. Trees are too precious to cut so only deadfall is really available.
Coal really is a better fuel than wood though if you are set up to burn it - more energy dense, easier to stoke (autostokers available too), easier to store in volume, cheaper when you consider the value of your time, truck gas and saw maintenance.
And the prices are very stable as the markets for coal are massive and slow moving. You can plan out and buy a year's supply easily unlike gaseous fuels that leave you vulnerable to gouging for spot prices.

Now if I could drill a well and hit gas, that would be mighty fine! You guys don't even need that much heat down there, what a waste

IDIGIT · #14 03/26/14, 06:43 AM

I have a outdoor wood and coal stove keep the house on 75°. I usually buy one and a half ton of coal for the extremely cold nights. I have over 200 acres mostly timber so fire wood is not a problem. However I do need to buy propane for my grill can't cook those hamburgers and hotdogs without gas I might have to go back to charcoal bricks

Darren · #15 03/26/14, 07:06 AM

Quote:

Originally Posted by plowjockey

Propane doubled in price, so naturally, NG should double in price, too, right?

Thanks to fracking, NG is very plentiful here, but usage is also going way up, so it's not unreasonable to expect prices to eventually rise. they probably just doubled the cost because they can, since demand i high this extremely cold winter.

Hopefully propane and NG will go back down, if the weather ever warms up.

Propane went up because of the unusual demand from agriculture. As one of the gases found with natural gas it may become cheaper as more of the shale play wells are put into production. The industry also needs to build more stripper plants to remove the wet gasses like propane.

If someone's natural gas bill went up, my guess is they live in one of those states that happily jumped on the deregulation bandwagon. West Virginia did not and prices are still regulated. The PSC is still eyeballing the pricing shenanigans of the utilities.

Truckinguy · #16 03/26/14, 09:33 AM

Here in Ontario Enbridge has applied to the Ontario Energy Board for a 40% price increase saying that they used up all their cheap reserves of gas due to the unusually cold winter and now have to buy more gas at higher prices. They say it's only temporary and the prices will come down again in the summer as they are able to resupply their reserves at better prices.

That's their story, anyway...

simi-steading · #17 03/26/14, 09:37 AM

I really can't say if the price of mine doubled or not... What would the doubled price of free be?

MichaelK! · #18 03/26/14, 12:00 PM

The real issue we should all be talking about is not whether or not the price of NG went up 100%, but that some NG industry people are talking about NG liquification plants so we can ship liquified NG overseas to Europe.

You wanna talk about price gouging then, when supplies are even lower?

Frankly, I don't care if Europeans are getting screwed by the Russians right now because Russia supplies a lot of Europe's gas. We need to keep American gas in America!

opportunity · #19 03/26/14, 02:18 PM

Around here it's a transportation issue. There is only so much room in the gas pipes and when they are full that is it. There is gas just not where it should be.

where I want to · #20 03/26/14, 02:23 PM

The story I heard for the rise in LP was that so many pipelines had been taken over to transport gas. So why could the problem be transportation of gas to explain the rise in that?