Natural gas prices experienced a positive upswing on Thursday, putting an end to a three-session decline that saw the market lose 8% of its value within just 48 hours. The most-active contract on the New York Mercantile Exchange’s Henry Hub, August gas, rose by 3.3 cents or 1.2%, settling at $2.701 per mmBtu (metric million British thermal units).
Concerns had arisen earlier in the week regarding lackluster demand for gas-driven cooling since the official start of the U.S. summer on June 21. As a result, gas futures on the hub’s benchmark witnessed a decline of 18.8 cents over Tuesday and Wednesday.
However, the Energy Information Administration (EIA) released a report on Thursday that revealed a smaller-than-expected storage build for the week ended June 23. The injection of gas into storage amounted to 76 billion cubic feet (bcf), below the forecasted 83 bcf predicted by industry analysts tracked by Investing.com.
Comparing this data to the same week the previous year and the five-year average, the 76-bcf build was slightly lower than the 81-bcf increase seen a year ago and just below the average of 80 bcf from 2018 to 2022. This brought the total gas held in inventory across the United States to 2.239 trillion cubic feet (tcf), representing a 25.3% increase compared to the same week in the prior year and a 14.6% rise over the five-year average.
Despite mixed heat trends across the country, natural gas has demonstrated resilience throughout the month, with the market staying predominantly positive. In fact, June has witnessed a gain of just over 18% for futures on the Henry Hub, making it the best-performing month in almost a year.
The last time the market experienced a more significant rally within a month was in July 2022, when it achieved a remarkable 46% increase.
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