Will natural gas bills go up after Texas outages? Atmos Energy says not in ‘near term’

After asking customers to conserve natural gas during widespread power outages in Texas, Atmos Energy announced Tuesday that the recent winter storm will not affect customer bills in the “near-term.”

Atmos, one of the country’s largest natural gas distributors, acknowledged that natural gas prices skyrocketed last week. The Dallas-based company does not plan to pass those costs to customers in February or March.

“We have been and will continue working with regulators to find solutions that will minimize the impact on monthly bills,” a company release reads. “Until those solutions are identified, the gas cost portion of a customer’s bill will reflect normal, seasonal gas prices.”

However, natural gas users could see their bills increase in those months because of high usage throughout the winter months, according to Atmos.

Customers are not out of the woods when it comes to paying higher bills this year. Natural gas prices surged by 10,000% during the winter crisis, as generators went down, scarcity in the market went up and millions of Texans needed gas to heat their homes.

In a U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission filing, Atmos disclosed that it may pay up to $3.5 billion for the extra gas it purchased throughout the winter storm, according to Bloomberg News. The company’s shares on the New York Stock Exchange fell by about 4% on Monday as executives seek other funding sources to pay off the costs.

The issue could have far-reaching consequences for states outside of Texas that also rely on Atmos and other utilities. Last week, Sen. Tina Smith, a Democrat from Minnesota, called for a federal investigation into potential price gouging in the natural gas market.

In a letter to top federal regulators, Smith wrote that the power crisis has had “several ripple effects” across the U.S. The federal government should examine its options to provide financial support to gas providers and their customers, she wrote.

“These drastic price increases are forcing utilities and other natural gas users to incur exorbitant costs, much of which could be passed along to consumers in the form of higher electric or natural gas bills over the next year,” Smith wrote. “Further, the price spikes may threaten the financial stability of some utilities that do not have sufficient cash reserves to cover their short-term costs of this extraordinary event.”