Prices at the gas pump may be soaring with the Ukrainian-Russian conflict escalating, but what about the price of natural gas to heat your home?
Dylan Huberman spoke to an official at People’s Natural Gas to find out and joins us now live with more.
Jess despite what you may think, the cost of natural gas is not shooting up like the fuel for your car is.
“It’s not affecting the price of natural gas for our customers.”
In fact, people’s gas spokesman Barry Cook of it says prices actually declined.
“Natural gas for the first time in several years trended upwards to the end of last year. And then, even though it sounds kind of counterintuitive. The price of natural gas
dropped for the first quarter of this year, which was which is January, February, March.”
And unlike the price hikes we’re seeing from gas corporations,
“Our company makes no money from from the sale of gas. And again, as counterintuitive people say, how can that be? But the real reason behind it is you look at your gas
bill divided into two parts one is basically own an operation, and that’s what we pay our workers what we, you know, ripping out old lines, replacing their lines, what we
spend on our equipment. The other half of the bill is the actual price of gas, the commodity itself.”
“It’s incumbent upon us to go out and try to find the cheapest gas we can buy, purchase that gas and deliver it to our customers and pass through costs. We did not make money
on that”
He says another reason the price is unaffected is that natural gas is totally different from what goes in your car.
“t’s its own type of element, you know, and the interesting thing about natural gas is probably about 95% of it is methane, which is usually the hot burn for your furnaces
and everything, but you can pull other gases out of it.”
“You can tap that cigarette lighters or propane for propane tanks or ethane, which is a feedstock for the production of plastics. So there are two very different directions.”
And he says the misconception people may see on their bills isn’t a unit price increase It’s really an uptick in usage.
“People don’t look at that and they say, Well, gee, it’s winter. My gas bills going up so much, it is because they’re simply using more gas. And I use the analogy like,
right now, gasoline is going up so tremendously.”
“We’re all paying more. But it’s almost like, let’s say, the gas, the price of per gallon and gasoline is actually gone down. But maybe your boss told you, Listen, I, we’re
changing your job and now you have to drive.”
He says the next price evaluation will come later in the Spring.
