Natural gas forecasting has evolved into a lucrative enterprise in the wake of U.S. energy market restructuring. The field is composed of university-trained economists who have been hired by consulting firms to produce information about the future of energy markets. The increased visibility of these firms reflects a growing reliance on consultant advisory services that try to identify core uncertainties and to help organizations have the capacity to be ready for them.

In fall 2000, natural gas forecasters emerged as architects of an energy outlook capable of altering the U.S. natural gas industry. Basing their image of the future on a forecasted rise in the long-term price for natural gas, these economists predicted an expansion to the self-enclosed North American natural gas market. While the rise in price failed to materialize, their image of the future has since inspired government and financial leaders to establish a global gas industry.

The idea that the future has a significant role to play in the construction of the present is by no means a new one. Anthony Giddens writes that “under conditions of modernity, the future is continually drawn into the present by means of the reflexive organization of knowledge environments.”¹ The discourse through which this occurs involves terminologies of risk. Ulrich Beck characterizes late modernity as a risk society, in which “everyone is caught up in defensive battles of various types, anticipating the hostile substances in one’s manner of living.”²

Calculating risk in the natural gas industry is also an open-ended, future-oriented project, the goal of which is to anticipate all loci of uncertainty while increasing the chance of economic success. This is especially the case since the 1980s, when market restructuring adopted institutions from the financial industry so that natural gas prices could be based on competition rather than regulation. Restructuring also expanded the role of energy marketers. Firms such as Enron (now bankrupt) and Dynergy can generate untold profits by speculating on prices located at different trading points along the continental natural gas pipeline network.

But the industry’s competitive structure has raised problems for an older market segment of energy producers and pipeline companies that seek to develop new sources of natural gas supply. By renouncing control over energy prices, government dismantled an environment in which financial instruments such as long-term contracts could diminish the high-stakes uncertainty of investing in large energy systems (pipelines, power stations). As such, market risk has become critically privatized. Today, it is extremely difficult to synchronize the long-term horizon of energy production, which is measured in years, with the short-term fluctuations of energy price. Tackling the problem is generating interest in technologies that can create perspectives that are fundamental for institutionalization and social coordination.

The purpose of this article is to identify a few of the forms in which natural gas forecasters and the consulting firms they work for become partly responsible for new energy development on a local and global scale. Since restructuring, consulting firms have had an organizational significance for the way government and industry leaders stabilize perspectives on energy markets. These firms combine technical prediction with new modes of communicative exchange and are important for the knowledge they generate but also for the forms of socialization and ritual-like learning environment they create.