Historic and Forecast Northwest Gas Hub Prices

While the Council’s natural gas price forecast covers many hubs across the Western US, there are three pricing hubs that are the primary pricing points for our modeling and planning work:

Sumas (British Columbia gas flowing South)
AECO (Alberta gas flowing South)
Opal (US Rockies gas supply flowing West)

The Sumas price hub sits on the Washington state border with British Columbia. Spectra Energy’s Westcoast Pipeline brings Western Canadian gas south to the US Northwest region where it intersects with the Williams Northwest Pipeline at Sumas. Gas then flows south along the I5 corridor and feeds regional storage, power plants and electric utilities, gas local distribution companies (LDC) and industrial users.

AECO is a virtual trading point in Alberta that represents trades on the TransCanada Alberta Pipeline System. Western Canadian gas flows south the region via the Gas Transmission Northwest Pipeline (GTN). A significant portion of the gas flows south into California, but gas also serves regional load east of the Cascades, and also can flow west through the Colombia River Gorge to the west side.

The Opal gas hub is in Southwest Wyoming and is a pricing point for US Rockies gas flowing West. US Rockies gas can serve gas load on the east side of the region and can also flow west through the Columbia Gorge on the Northwest Pipeline to serve west side load.

Here is the Council’s price forecast for these three select hubs, along with recent historic data. A note, this data represents spot prices for natural gas. Long term contracts for gas and hedging strategies are not necessary reflected in these prices.

The forecast begins in January 2020. Historic monthly price data has been updated through July of 2020. For the most part, the monthly prices in 2020 have been in the low range. Near term gas prices have tanked due to plenty of supply and a drop in demand from a warm winter and fallout from the Covid19 pandemic.

A note on Sumas prices: in October of 2018, there was a major pipeline rupture and explosion on the Enbridge BC Pipeline near Prince George BC, roughly 450 miles north of the Washington state border. This severely cut gas flows the to the Sumas hub and beyond, resulting in very high gas prices that lasted through the late winter of 2019. Section 1.1.4 provides more detail on the incident and the price repercussions.

A set of forecasts for WECC-wide hubs is also available. These are the price forecast inputs used in the Council’s Aurora model, which is used to evaluate and forecast wholesale electricity prices.

Annual Hub Prices – Sumas