For beleaguered natural gas bulls, 2020 has brought one headwind after another. First, it was an unseasonably mild winter that flipped a long-standing storage deficit to a surplus and sent prices tumbling to 25-year lows. Then, it was COVID-19 which, after a brief period of optimism surrounding production declines, brought temperature-independent losses in industrial and commercial demand that exceeded the drop in supply. Over the past month, the bearish headlines have turned to focus on LNG exports.
LNG exports first became a new source of domestic natural gas demand during the first quarter of 2016