Bloomberg Intelligence Sep 21, 2026
With Henry Eaton, US Natural Gas Market Analyst at BloombergNEF
The United States has plenty of natural gas in the ground. What it does not have is the pipe to move it where the data centers are going, or the turbine capacity to burn it — order books at the large manufacturers are full, and Henry Eaton puts new capacity five to six years out.
The usual framing is that abundant shale gas solves the data-center power problem. Eaton's is that two demand curves are arriving at once and the supply side cannot bend fast enough to meet both.
"a gas turbine ordered today, we don't see coming online by 2031 at the earliest"
Eaton is a US natural gas market analyst at BloombergNEF, the Bloomberg team Paul Sweeney introduced as having the best data out there on the global energy business, and on Bloomberg Intelligence he was asked the demand-side question rather than the supply one.
The full segment is covered here so you can skip it.
Here are the 4 predictions that matter.
Key Takeaways
The two demand drivers for the next 5-10 yrs are data centers and LNG exports, and they arrive together
Data centers grow faster in percentage terms; LNG is the bigger absolute addition
The constraint is not reserves but pipeline capacity, and the Northeast is far harder to build in than West Texas
A gas turbine ordered today is not expected online before 2031 — about five to six years to secure new capacity
Eaton sees an undersupplied market over the next five to ten years, while stressing that is not the same as running out of gas
The two things that could rebalance it are a global LNG glut curtailing US export facilities and speculative data centers that were only ever announcements
1. Two Demand Drivers
The segment arrived through the previous guest. Sweeney made the point that all these data centers all over the country have to be powered up and electrified, and that a lot of it is done with natural gas.
Edward Price agreed, and named the source
We have a lot of nat gas, because we frack it down in the oil patch.
Edward Price
Scarlet Fu noted that was his second gig; Sweeney said he was thinking about it. Then Sweeney brought in Eaton, with a preamble about the team behind him.
How the host described BloombergNEF
The folks here at Bloomberg, they analyze the energy evolution taking place. They have all the data. The best data out there as it relates to the global energy business.
Paul Sweeney
His question was deliberately about demand, on the basis that the supply is there. Eaton's answer had two parts and one time frame.
The two things pulling on US gas
There are two key drivers that we see through the next five to ten years. That is data centers, as you mentioned, are expected to consume a lot of natural gas, as well as LNG exports.
Henry Eaton
And the export half, which is already running
We export a lot of our energy overseas, and that has only ramped up over the past few years and will continue to ramp up over the next five to 10.
Henry Eaton
Someone on the desk summarized it as a long-term bullish story.
2. Pipelines, Not Reserves
Fu asked how difficult or easy it is to get the gas to where the data centers are actually being built.
Eaton's first move was to reject the national framing. The US gas story is a very regional one, he said, and the answer depends on where a given data center is deployed. The reserves are plentiful — a lot of it in Texas, in the Permian, in West Texas, with production also in the Northeast, in Appalachia.
The problem is the pipe.
The constraint in one sentence
We have it under the ground. It's a question of getting there.
Henry Eaton
And the difficulty is not uniform.
Where building is hard, and where it is not
Building pipeline capacity in the northeast, for example, is extremely difficult, much more difficult than in, say, West Texas.
Henry Eaton
Where pipe cannot be built, he described a second mechanism that clears the market instead.
Price as the balancing valve
The other option is to use price as a balancing mechanism and have that price unlock more expensive supply that we see in the Haynesville Basin, which is in eastern Texas and western Louisiana.
Henry Eaton
3. The Turbine Queue
Sweeney asked whether natural gas is enough to fuel the data centers on its own, or whether it is one source among several.
Eaton expects a combination of fuels, but said gas has a particular characteristic that suits this load.
Why gas fits a data center's demand shape
A gas plant can ramp up and down quickly like a data center needs.
Henry Eaton
Then he named the bottleneck, which is not the fuel and not the pipe.
The equipment, and the wait for it
Order books at a lot of the large manufacturers are full. And a gas turbine ordered today, we don't see coming online by 2031 at the earliest. So it's about five to six years to secure new capacity.
Henry Eaton
His own word for that was a challenge.
4. Something Has to Give
Fu asked how fast LNG exports are growing relative to data-center demand.
Eaton separated relative growth from absolute volume, and the two answers point in different directions. On a relative scale, he believes the data-center growth rate is quicker. On volume, it is not close.
Which one actually moves the market
On an absolute basis for gas demand, LNG is going to be the largest contributor to new natural gas demand over the next five to 10 years.
Henry Eaton
What has changed is the gap between them. BloombergNEF's latest data-center outlook, he said, has pushed the power sector much closer to LNG.
The collision
we see these two major demand sectors colliding essentially at the same time. And so essentially something needs to give.
Henry Eaton
What his team's current view implies
We see an undersupplied market over the next five to ten years from what we can see today.
Henry Eaton
He immediately bounded the claim: the US is not going to run out of gas. The statement is that something has to give, and he named two candidates on the demand side — both of which would give without any new supply arriving.
The first is that the export leg deflates.
A global glut would idle US liquefaction
we see a global LNG oversupply, meaning that there's a lot of liquefaction capacity coming online, particularly here in the U.S.
Henry Eaton
If global LNG prices come down over the next five years, he said, US facilities could face curtailments, which would reduce LNG's demand impact directly.
The second is that the data centers do not all get built.
Most of the pipeline is an announcement, not a project
a lot of the data centers that we're looking at are fairly speculative. Meaning that they're just announcements rather than committed facilities.
Henry Eaton
Either one, on his account, could move the numbers around and bring the market back into balance.
Bonus Insights
He kept separating percentage growth from volume
The LNG-versus-data-centers answer turned entirely on that distinction: the faster-growing sector is not the one adding the most gas demand, and Eaton answered both versions of the question rather than picking one.
The uncertainty cut both ways, and he said so
Every one of his rebalancing scenarios was a reason his own undersupply call might not happen. He framed the five-to-ten-year shortfall as what the current data shows, not as a forecast he was defending.
The desk closed on the price itself
After Eaton finished, the hosts read the natural gas price off the screen — $2.85 per million BTU — with a brief detour over whether BTU stands for British Thermal Unit, and a callback to the earlier land man joke.
Eaton's bottom line is that US natural gas is heading into a five-to-ten-year period where LNG exports and data-center power demand arrive at once against pipeline and turbine constraints that cannot be relieved in that time, and that the market rebalances through demand falling away rather than supply catching up.
Products, Companies & Tools Mentioned
BloombergNEF (Eaton's team; Sweeney introduced it as the Bloomberg group analyzing the energy evolution with the best data on the global energy business)
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