Propane prices haven’t
started summer this low since
the Covid-19 lockdown three
years ago.
A lot of the heating fuel
was left over after an unusually warm winter, while record
output from natural-gas drill-ers and oil refiners has offset
record exports. Propane prices
in commodity markets are
more than 50% lower than a
year ago and about $1 a gallon
less than the pandemic peak.
Propane cost 60 cents a
gallon this past week at the
trading hub in Mont Belvieu,
Texas, where benchmark
prices are determined for fu-tures traders, exporters and
Gulf Coast chemical makers. It
hit 58 cents Friday at the Kan-sas market that influences
what a lot of farmers pay for
propane that they burn to dry
autumn harvests.
Residential prices aren’t
tracked in the spring and
summer as closely as they are
during the heating season,
when millions of mostly rural
Americans rely on propane to
warm their homes, cook and shower in hot water. But con-sumer prices have eased. On
New York’s Long Island, the
average price in April was
$4.16 a gallon, down from
$4.34 in May of 2022, which
was the highest price in 25
years of state energy data.
Declining prices are great
news for the roughly 5% of
Americans who rely on pro-pane to heat their homes—
not to mention grillers, fork-lift operators, patio
restaurants, owners of heated
pools and other summer pro-pane burners.
Cheaper propane should
also ripple through plastic
supply chains. Huge volumes
are used to make polypropyl-ene, which goes into automo-biles, appliances, packaging
and carpet. As recently as 2009, the
U.S. was a net importer of
propane. The shale-drilling
boom changed that. In 2013,
the U.S. overtook Qatar as the
world’s biggest propane ex-porter. A few years later the
U.S. was shipping more pro-pane than the entire Middle
East