Runaway Henry Hub prices? One wonders where exactly people are looking when they say that—because it is certainly not at the numbers themselves.
Henry Hub sits, what, a touch above three dollars per MMBtu. Call it three, call it a bit more if you want to sound dramatic. Now place that next to Europe, next to Asia, where prices have a habit of wandering into the high teens, the twenties, sometimes well beyond when the system is under stress. You are not looking at a marginal difference. You are looking at an order-of-magnitude gap.
Ten times. Sometimes more.
And yet we speak of “runaway.”
Even if Henry Hub were to double—if it were to stage the kind of rally that would normally trigger alarm—it would still be cheap by any global standard that actually matters. Not competitive. Not reasonable. Cheap.
And that is before you even descend into the regional underbelly of North American gas pricing, where various hubs trade significantly below Henry Hub itself. Half that level is not uncommon. At that point, we are approaching something that, while perhaps not quite “as cheap as dirt,” is close enough that the distinction begins to lose practical meaning.
Because here is the part that rarely makes it into the conversation.
At those levels, energy ceases to be a dominant constraint. It does not vanish from the equation entirely—that would be too convenient—but it shrinks. It becomes a secondary consideration in decisions that, in other parts of the world, are dominated by energy cost. Industrial processes, manufacturing, chemical production—activities that elsewhere must constantly negotiate with volatile and expensive inputs—can operate in an environment where energy is, if not negligible, then at least comfortably subordinate.
North America has enjoyed this condition for more than a decade.
And what, exactly, has been done with it?
Beyond the obvious—LNG exports, the monetization of surplus gas through liquefaction and shipment abroad—the list of transformative alternative uses is surprisingly short. One might have expected a more aggressive reconfiguration of industrial landscapes, a broader exploitation of structurally cheap energy. Instead, the response has been measured, even hesitant.
Part of that is inertia. Part of it is capital discipline. And part of it is something less flattering: self-imposed constraint.
Because even within a system awash with cheap gas, there are pockets where it cannot be fully utilized. Flare gas—produced as a byproduct of oil extraction and simply burned off because there is insufficient infrastructure to capture and transport it—remains a persistent feature. Not because the gas lacks value, but because moving it from where it is to where it could be used requires pipelines. And pipelines, in certain jurisdictions, have become something akin to forbidden architecture.
Proposals stall. Permits evaporate. Opposition materializes with predictable efficiency. The result is a peculiar spectacle: a resource being literally set on fire while parallel discussions lament scarcity and price pressures elsewhere.
One might suggest, somewhat mischievously, that regions determined to obstruct such infrastructure should be allowed to fully experience the consequences of that choice. Let prices rise where resistance is strongest, while others—less inclined toward self-sabotage—continue to benefit from abundance.
But systems, unfortunately for the neatness of such thought experiments, do not fragment so cleanly. Interconnections exist. Political realities intrude. The burden tends to be shared, whether or not the decisions that created it were.
Still, the broader point remains stubbornly intact.
More than a decade of LNG exports—substantial, growing, often cited as the mechanism that would finally “tighten” the domestic market—has not managed to push Henry Hub into anything resembling global price territory. The feared convergence has not materialized. The domestic market, for all its exposure to international demand, retains a structural oversupply that keeps prices anchored.
And why would that suddenly change?
Much of the gas being liquefied and exported is, in a very real sense, surplus. Gas that, absent export capacity, would struggle to find a home at anything approaching an attractive price. Gas that would either depress domestic markets further or, in some cases, be flared because the infrastructure to move it does not exist or is not permitted to exist.
Exports, then, are not simply draining the system. They are relieving it.
Which makes the narrative of imminent price explosion feel less like analysis and more like habit—a reflex carried over from a time when scarcity was the dominant assumption and abundance the exception.
We are no longer in that world.
And until something materially alters the balance—be it a dramatic shift in production, a structural change in demand, or a policy environment that somehow manages to both restrict supply and accelerate consumption—the odds of North American gas prices behaving like their European or Asian counterparts remain, to put it mildly, limited.
The system has been stress-tested.
It has bent, occasionally, but it has not broken.
And for now, at least, it continues to produce something that much of the rest of the world can only look at with a mixture of envy and disbelief:
Energy that is not just available, but persistently, stubbornly cheap.