NYMEX Henry Hub Holds at $2.67 as Wood Mackenzie Warns Cheap US Supply Is Running Out
Henry Hub front-month sat unchanged at glut-level pricing on Friday while Wood Mackenzie warned near-zero-cost supply is losing share and the EIA raised its 2026-27 price forecasts.
NYMEX Henry Hub front-month held at $2.67/MMBtu on Friday (2026-08-07), posting no change in a session where ICE Brent crude front-month edged up 0.33% to $82.27 per barrel and the URA uranium ETF gained 3.64%. The gas price has gone nowhere. Analysts at ProShares observed that $2.67/MMBtu was a glut-level reading as of the week of May 11 (2026-05-11), a characterisation that held even when Qatar's LNG export volumes were running partially disrupted. Three months on, the number has not shifted.2
Wood Mackenzie placed that stagnation inside a longer structural argument when it warned on July 8 (2026-07-08) that the decade of cheap US gas is drawing to a close. Supply growth at near-zero marginal cost has underpinned Henry Hub pricing for most of the past ten years, but the firm's analyst Wang wrote that its share is expected to fall below 20% within a decade. "Prices will need to go higher and stay higher to bring new molecules to market," Wang wrote. The front-month price is not confirming that view yet.4
The EIA moved in the same direction in its July short-term energy outlook, released around July 15 (2026-07-15), raising its Henry Hub spot price projection for both 2026 and 2027. The revisions acknowledge the supply-side tightening that Wood Mackenzie described, though the agency's changes in forecast level do not alter the near-term physical picture.5
Weather is. EBW Analytics Group analyst Eli Rubin, writing in a report sent to Rigzone around July 15 (2026-07-15), said milder conditions were undermining gas demand and suppressing near-term fundamentals. A contract sitting flat at $2.67/MMBtu in early August fits that reading.5
Wood Mackenzie offered an important qualification alongside its longer-run thesis: Henry Hub remains a localised benchmark, shaped by supply, demand, and infrastructure conditions in southern Louisiana. That framing matters because it caps how much the energy transition narrative abroad, or the nuclear buildout underway globally, can move the contract in the short run. Pipeline throughput, storage levels, and temperature do the near-term work.4
Which is not to say Friday's (2026-08-07) uranium move is irrelevant to the longer gas demand picture. The URA ETF's 3.64% gain reflects commitments that have been accumulating for some time: as of June (2026-06-12), 38 countries had pledged to triple nuclear capacity by 2050, Meta had announced agreements covering up to 6.6 gigawatts-electrical of nuclear supply, and the long-term uranium contract price had reached $91.50 per pound. A meaningful nuclear buildout over the next decade shifts the baseload generation mix in ways that trim the marginal call on gas-fired power — not this quarter, but within the timeframe Wood Mackenzie is already modelling.3
The supply chain feeding that buildout is growing but uneven. Westinghouse reported first-quarter 2026 revenue of $606.30 million, missing consensus by 26%, while adjusted EBITDA climbed 33% to $122 million and adjusted net earnings nearly tripled to $145.59 million. The gap between headline revenue and operating performance reflects how nuclear equipment orders convert slowly to recognised income.3
Nuclear equities have been anything but stable through this buildout phase. On May 18 (2026-05-18), Oklo Inc. shed 9.38% and SMR, headquartered in Corvallis, Oregon, dropped more than 9% in a single session. In mid-June (2026-06-12), the NLR nuclear ETF was quoted at $115.52, down 21% over the prior month alongside the broader sector pullback, even while retaining a 19% gain over the prior year.1,3
Friday's (2026-08-07) 3.64% URA gain shows those drawdowns are recoverable. But the session split between rising nuclear sentiment and a flat NYMEX Henry Hub front-month illustrates how the market is pricing on two different timescales simultaneously: structural reorientation of power generation on one hand, and a southern Louisiana gas hub that has not budged from $2.67/MMBtu on the other.
The near-term test is how storage injection pace develops through the remainder of August. If injections continue to build under mild conditions, the supply cushion that has held prices at current levels will deepen, and the upward revisions the EIA and Wood Mackenzie are signalling will stay a forecast rather than a trade.5,4