Everybody is complaining about the high cost of heating our homes with natural gas this winter, but this year’s spike in our bills, which has been exacerbated by the colder-than-usual winter, has been completely predictable.
Massachusetts has had the 5th-highest natural gas prices in the U.S for many years for which there are two main reasons:
The first is that thanks to the Jones Act (which involves maritime shipping and unions and dates back to 1920), we have to import our liquefied natural gas (LNG), at far greater expense from Trinidad and other places outside the U.S., instead of from the LNG terminals along the U.S. Gulf Coast.
Second, and more significantly, we have been unable to take advantage of the abundant supply of natural gas from the nearby Marcellus Field in Pennsylvania because of environmental regulations and lawsuits that have prevented the construction of new pipelines to our area.
We are within just a few hundred miles of the largest natural gas-producing area in the country, but we are unable to access it, which has resulted in our need to import LNG via tankers from foreign sources.
So yes, we are spending more this winter to heat our homes because of the colder-than-normal weather. But our natural gas prices are greater than almost everywhere else in the country — and will continue to be for the foreseeable future — thanks to a combination of our nation’s antiquated maritime shipping laws and environmental lawsuits that have prevented new pipelines from coming to our region from the Marcellus field in nearby Pennsylvania.