All eyes have been on oil but gas is back so who will bet on it?

All eyes have been on oil but gas is back so who will bet on it?

From the onset of the Covid-19 pandemic, the energy sector's attention has been focused on oil market turbulence and emerging green energy technology.

Another key energy source has endured a dull decade. But as it sets price records and is tangled up in geopolitics, gas is back.

US gas prices have been low for more than a decade. They crashed during the financial crisis of 2008 and, since then, the torrent of shale gas has kept them almost always below $3 per million British thermal units (Btu), the equivalent of $17 for a barrel of oil. Numerous companies began projects to export liquefied natural gas to the rest of the world to ease the surplus.

Prices elsewhere have been higher but generally restrained. Asian LNG prices, by convention mostly determined by reference to oil, dropped along with crude in late 2014 and generally hovered between $5 and $10 per million Btu.

There was a crisis over Russian supplies to Europe via Ukraine after Moscow’s annexation of Crimea in 2014, but this did not cause real shortages, unlike the cut-off of 2009.

China announced a policy to reduce pollution by switching from coal to gas, especially for home heating, and its imports of LNG and gas by pipeline from Central Asia and Russia increased.

Overall, a world which had worried about running out of gas in the early 2000s, as with oil, became accustomed to abundant, inexpensive gas as a fact of nature. The main debate has not been over price or availability but what place gas should have in the necessary transition to low-carbon energy.