From January to March, natural gas exports from the United States grew 13.3% annually to a record 19.925 million cubic feet per day, driven by growing demand from European countries seeking to reduce their dependence on Russian natural gas.
This rate of progress was higher than the growth of 8.3% in the first quarter of 2021 and is mainly explained by a 24% increase in shipments of natural gas in liquid state (liquefied natural gas), which amounted to 11,496 million cubic feet per day. and represented 57.7% of total US exports, according to figures from the US government’s Energy Information Administration (EIA).
Mexico continues to be the main export destination, but our country faces growing competition for the US molecule, whose price remains the lowest in the world but faces strong upward pressure.
Mexican purchases amounted to 5,546 million cubic feet per day, a figure that was 1.6% lower than that of the first quarter of 2021 and represented the first year-on-year decrease in at least a decade.
This volume represented 28% of the total volume exported by the United States, a share that has been halved from the maximum share of 57% reached in 2016. Canada is the second market with shipments of 2,888 million cubic feet per day (+2.2 percent).
Completing the top five are France, with purchases that tripled to reach 1,713 barrels per day; Spain, whose volume almost multiplied by six to 1,644 million cubic feet per day; and the United Kingdom, which demanded 1,580 cubic feet per day, double compared to the first quarter of 2021.
In this period, the average price of US natural gas in a gaseous state grew 30.8% year-on-year to 4.66 dollars per million BTU, the highest value for an equal period since 2014, when it reached 5.2 dollars per million BTU. It should be noted that the export price in a liquid state can be doubled due to the liquefaction costs and the freight by ship.
Mexico imports around 70% of the natural gas it consumes, where the electricity generation sector is the largest demander with almost two thirds of total national consumption.