Forecasting the price of natural gas is easy. The US Energy Information Agency does it regularly, and like all seasoned forecasters, it produces a slightly wobbly line trending slightly higher or lower. Based on its latest, we expect smooth sailing, with gently rising prices as is appropriate for the relaxing calm that reigns in the natural gas market. Alas, reality is a series of violent ups and down with sporadic and vicious spikes. 

The fiasco playing out in the natural gas industry doesn’t happen often in a free market, and when it does happen, it’s usually short: namely, prices below production costs. In the shakeout, less efficient or poorly capitalized producers get wiped out. Part of capitalism that weeds out weaker elements through sweeps of creative destruction. But in natural gas, the price has been below production costs for years, and the damage is huge.

Dirt cheap natural gas has done wonders for America. Bene-ficiaries are scattered across the country: households with lower heating bills, industrial users, utilities, companies dreaming of building LNG export terminals to benefit from prices that are several times higher in the international markets. Yet it’s tearing up the very industry that is producing it, and capital destruction has reached epic proportions. But the bloody end is near.

The plight of natural gas driller Chesapeake Energy could almost make you feel sorry for CEO McClendon. He lost his chairmanship after his conflicted entanglements and an in-house hedge fund had seeped out. The company announced it may run out of cash next year. Fitch, in downgrading Chesapeake, estimated that the shortfall this year would reach $10 billion…. All due to the low price of natural gas and the ugly economics of fracking.

The fourth warmest winter on record, which curtailed the use of natural gas for heating, coincided with record production of natural gas. Storage facilities, filled to record levels for this time of the year, may soon reach capacity, forcing the industry to flare excess gas. This, doom-and-gloom theorists go, will force the price of gas to zero in the US. The point of maximum pain. But there’s a monumental shift, and demand is spiking.

Natural gas is dirt cheap, hovering at a 10-year low. In the US, that is. In other parts of the world, natural gas is four, five times more expensive—a rare discrepancy in a globalized economy. But the US, largest producer in the world, stunningly, has no facilities to export it. So President Obama has made dirt-cheap natural gas a cornerstone of his energy policy, but investors are bloodied, and drilling activity is falling off a cliff.