Natural gas futures settled lower on Wednesday, but the market rallied sharply in after-hours trading following news of another Appalachian pipeline disruption. The November 2026 contract settled 9 cents lower at $3.20 per MMBtu before spiking to as high as $3.33 shortly before 4 p.m. Eastern. Prices subsequently retreated from those highs, but at the time of writing, the market has recovered nearly all of the day’s losses.
Columbia Gas Transmission declared force majeure following the discovery of a leak on the Mountaineer XPress pipeline in West Virginia, near the same location as an unexpected outage in September. The affected segment carries approximately 1.9 million Dth per day, and scheduled flows will be reduced to zero beginning immediately. The operator stated that the new leak is unrelated to the previous incident, but the sharp price response suggests market participants may be concerned about a more prolonged disruption this time around.
Total U.S. natural gas production declined by approximately 1.5 Bcf per day during the September outage, when overall output was running higher than current levels. A similar reduction from the recent baseline could bring production below 109 Bcf per day. A prolonged disruption would reduce the volume of gas available for storage injections ahead of winter, representing a bullish development for the market.
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