Why 2026 Could Be the Year of Expensive Natural Gas

America runs on natural gas.

That’s not an exaggeration. Almost half of home heating is done with natural gas, and around 40% — the plurality — of our electricity is generated with natural gas. Data center developers are pouring billions into natural gas power plants built on-site to feed their need for computational power. In its -260 degree Fahrenheit liquid form, the gas has attracted tens of billions of dollars in investments to export it abroad.

The energy and climate landscape in the United States going into 2026 — and for a long time afterward — will be largely determined by the forces pushing and pulling on natural gas. Those could lead to higher or more volatile prices for electricity and home heating, and even possibly to structural changes in the electricity market.

But first, the weather.

“Heating demand is still the main way gas is used in the U.S.,” longtime natural gas analyst Amber McCullagh explained to me. That makes cold weather — experienced and expected — the main driver of natural gas prices, even with new price pressures from electricity demand.

New sources of demand don’t help, however. While estimates for data center construction are highly speculative, East Daily Analytics figures cited by trade publication Natural Gas Intel puts a ballpark figure of new data center gas demand at 2.5 billion cubic feet per day by the end of next year, compared to 0.8 billion cubic feet per day for the end of this year. By 2030, new demand from data centers could add up to over 6 billion cubic feet per day of natural gas demand, East Daley Analytics projects. That’s roughly in line with the total annual gas production of the Eagle Ford Shale in southwest Texas.

Then there are exports. The U.S. Energy Information Administration expects outbound liquified natural gas shipments to rise to 14.9 billion cubic feet per day this year, and to 16.3 billion cubic feet in 2026. In 2024, by contrast, exports were just under 12 billion cubic feet per day.

“Even as we’ve added demand for data centers, we’re getting close to 20 billion per day of LNG exports,” McCullagh said, putting more pressure on natural gas prices.

That’s had a predictable effect on domestic gas prices. Already, the Henry Hub natural gas benchmark price has risen to above $5 per million British thermal units earlier this month before falling to $3.90, compared to under $3.50 at the end of last year. By contrast, LNG export prices, according to the most recent EIA data, are at around $7 per million BTUs.

This yawning gap between benchmark domestic prices and export prices is precisely why so many billions of dollars are being poured into LNG export capacity — and why some have long been wary of it, including Democratic politicians in the Northeast, which is chronically short of natural gas due to insufficient pipeline infrastructure. A group of progressive Democrats in Congress wrote a letter to Secretary of Energy Chris Wright earlier this year opposing additional licenses for LNG exports, arguing that “LNG exports lead to higher energy prices for both American families and businesses.”

Industry observers agree — or at least agree that LNG exports are likely to pull up domestic prices. “Henry Hub is clearly bullish right now until U.S. gas production catches up,” Ira Joseph, a senior research associate at the Center for Global Energy Policy at Columbia University, told me. “We’re definitely heading towards convergence” between domestic and global natural gas prices.

But while higher natural gas prices may seem like an obvious boon to renewables, the actual effect may be more ambiguous. The EIA expects the Henry Hub benchmark to average $4 per million BTUs for 2026. That’s nothing like the $9 the benchmark hit in August 2022, the result of post-COVID economic restart, supply tightness, and the Russian invasion of Ukraine.

Still, a tighter natural gas market could mean a more volatile electricity and energy sector in 2026. The United States is basically unique globally in having both large-scale domestic production of coal and natural gas that allows its electricity generation to switch between them. When natural gas prices go up, coal burning becomes more economically attractive.

Add to that, the EIA forecasts that electricity generation will have grown 2.4% by the end of 2025, and will grow another 1.7% in 2026, “in contrast to relatively flat generation from 2010 to 2020. That is “primarily driven by increasing demand from large customers, including data centers,” the agency says.

This is the load growth story. With the help of the Trump administration, it’s turning into a coal growth story, too.

Already several coal plants have extended out their retirement dates, either to maintain reliability on local grids or because the Trump administration ordered them to. In America’s largest electricity market, PJM Interconnection, where about a fifth of the installed capacity is coal, diversified energy company Alliance Resource Partners expects 4% to 6% demand growth, meaning it might even be able to increase coal production. Coal consumption has jumped 16% in PJM in the first nine months of 2025, the company’s Chairman Joseph Kraft told analysts.

“The domestic thermal coal market is continuing to experience strong fundamentals, supported by an unprecedented combination of federal energy and environmental policy support plus rapid demand growth,” Kraft said in a statement accompanying the company’s October third quarter earnings report. He pointed specifically to “natural gas pricing dynamics” and “the dramatic load growth required by artificial intelligence.”

Observers are also taking notice. “The key driver for coal prices remains strong natural gas prices,” industry newsletter The Coal Trader wrote.

In its December short term outlook, the EIA said that it expects “coal consumption to increase by 9% in 2025, driven by an 11% increase in coal consumption in the electric power sector this year as both natural gas costs and electricity demand increased,” while falling slightly in 2026 (compared to 2025), leaving coal consumption sill above 2024 levels.

“2025 coal generation will have increased for the first time since the last time gas prices spiked,” McCullagh told me.

Assuming all this comes to pass, the U.S.’s total carbon dioxide emissions will have essentially flattened out at around 4.8 million metric tons. The ultimate cost of higher natural gas prices will likely be felt far beyond the borders of the United States and far past 2026.