NEW YORK: US natural gas futures fell about 2% to a two-week low on Thursday on forecasts for lower demand next week and expectations power generators will burn less gas after Hurricane Milton knocked out power to millions of homes and businesses in Florida.

Milton slammed into the west coast of Florida as a major storm on Wednesday night and swept across the central part of the state on Thursday.

The storm has already caused over 3.2 million homes and businesses to lose power in Florida. Those outages will add to the roughly 103,000 customers still without service in North Carolina and Georgia since Hurricane Helene moved inland after hitting Florida on Sept. 26.

In 2023, power generators in Florida burned a record 3.9 billion cubic feet per day of gas to keep the lights on for the state’s roughly 11.5 million power customers, according to data from the US Energy Information Administration and PowerOutage.us.

That means every 1 million customer outages reduces the need to burn around 0.3 bcfd of gas on average.

Front-month gas futures for November delivery on the New York Mercantile Exchange fell 6.1 cents, or 2.3%, to $2.599 per million British thermal units at 8:02 a.m. EDT (1202 GMT), falling for a fifth day in a row and putting the contract on track for its lowest close since Sept. 26.