Stats › Currencies and commodities › Gas seasonality
The natural gas storage year
Natural gas is the most seasonal thing in the commodity complex. Americans fill their storage caverns roughly April through October and empty them roughly November through March, and the whole market, the futures curve, the volatility surface, the trade press, arranges itself around that cycle.
The EIA publishes the scorecard every Thursday at 10:30 in the morning, New York time. Working gas in underground storage, five regions, one number the whole market waits for. It is, and I did not know this until I looked it up for this page, the only weekly Principal Federal Economic Indicator the US government produces.
The thing that surprised me writing this was how thin the survey underneath it is. Eighty to eighty five respondents. A stratified sample, not a census, except in the Pacific. Standard errors computed by bootstrap. And then the weekly numbers are quietly calibrated to a slower monthly series afterwards. That is a perfectly respectable piece of statistics. It is also not what most people picture when a headline says storage "came in" at a number.
US working gas in storage was 3,084 Bcf for the week ending 24 Jul 2026, an injection of 28 Bcf, and 185 Bcf or 6.4% above the five year average of 2,899 Bcf. The series high is 4,047 Bcf in the week ending 11 Nov 2016 and the low is 824 Bcf in the week ending 28 Mar 2014. The largest weekly withdrawal ever recorded was 360 Bcf in the week ending 30 Jan 2026 during Winter Storm Fern, 89% above the five year average for that week, with Henry Hub spot at $9.03/MMBtu on 28 Jan. In February 2021 US production fell 8.1 Bcf/d month on month, the largest monthly decline on record, Texas output dropped more than 10 Bcf/d in nine days, Henry Hub hit $23.86/MMBtu, and more than 4.5 million Texans lost power.
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