Yeah, what happened to NG? Remember spending a good portion of the day reading through US's latest Energy Bill (now Energy Act 2010), and there was lots of focus on NG and how its the way to go until we develope (or allow developed) technology that is even more friendly to the environment.
But instead of spending some of that freshly printed dollars upgrading the public and commercial transport to NG, they have more or less blown it on crap. Like "saving" the auto-industry, by giving them money to keep producing products that will be completely obsolete in the very short term. Have fun selling gasoline-cars at 150$+++ a barrel. Instead they could have actually saved the industry by giving them enough money to convert their production-lines to public transport running on NG, and just buy all the busses etc. for the rest of the money. Would both give them a much needed value for their money, a great public transport service for when people can't afford to drive, while those payments for goods would keep the industry humming for a long time.
I guess it ain't without reason the CAD has surpassed the USD...
Anyways, I can't really see how the NG can keep such a spread to oil for much longer. And it ain't the oil thats going to close the gap, thats for sure. You could blame the surplus of NG, but it goes against all economical business-sense to run those dirty coal-plants when you got NG at such stable and low prices. Yet coal-consumption in the US increased 5% in 2010, and estimated to raise 2.6% in 2012, while NG is estimated to increase 1% in 2012.
At least thats yet another potentially huge trigger for our paper.
