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Natural gas prices: A shale-shocked calm? / Amlan Saha, International Energy, blog IAEE, 20/11/2011http://blog.iaee.org/?p=47463In 2000, The Economist, noting rising natural gas prices, concluded that “natural gas will be a seller’s market for some time to come”. It was short-lived. Natural gas prices doubled or halved in single 12-month periods at least five times in the decade to 2010. Historically, prices have been much more boring: for nearly seven decades till the lifting of wellhead gas price controls in 1989, they changed, on average, less than 10 percent a year. That changed in the noughties when highly volatile gas prices became the norm. So much so that they claimed several victims: Amaranth Advisors, a hedge fund, closed after losing almost $7 billion betting on rising natural gas prices in one of the largest trading losses; MotherRock, one of the biggest traders of natural gas derivatives on Wall Street, shut down after running up huge losses.