Natural gas consumption and climate: a comprehensive set of predictive state-level models for the United States

Separate models correlating natural gas (NG) consumption to climate have been developed for the residential and commercial sectors of the 50 U.S. states. The models relate a population-weighted average temperature to state per capita NG consumption on a monthly basis. The majority of the models have Pearson correlation coefficients greater than 0.90 supporting the use of temperature as the sole independent parameter. The sensitivities of the models to a 1°C increase in temperature, are compared for each state and the monthly sensitivity to climate integrated over the entire U.S. is investigated for a range of temperature perturbations. The predicted impact of a 1°C increase in mean monthly temperature on U.S. consumption is an 8.1% decrease in the residential sector and a 5.9% decrease in the commercial sector. In terms of the net consumption normalized over the study period (1984-1993) this corresponds to a 111.8 TWh decrease in the residential sector and a 47.0 TWh decrease in the commercial sector. The largest change for a single month occurs in January when consumption would decrease 19.7 TWh in the residential sector and 7.4 TWh in the commercial sector.