- US data centers could consume 18 billion cubic feet of natural gas per day by 2035
- Up to 3.4 billion cubic feet could come from on-site, off-grid generation
- The projects don't even include all data center plans
New Bloomberg data has revealed that US data center natural gas consumption could top the combined consumption of Germany and Japan combined by as soon as 2035.
In less than a decade, the report claims that America's gas consumption for data centers alone could reach 18 billion cubic feet per day.
That's nearly double what the data previously predicted just nine months ago, indicative not only of the growing data center footprint nationally but also the mounting strain on the grid system.
American data centers are using more and more natural gas
Crucially, these latest figures assume that some of the upcoming and announced projects may not even be built, so if every single project were to go ahead, consumption would reach even higher figures.
Consequently, the next decade will likely see data centers become the second-biggest source of US natural gas demand growth, second only to the country's LNG exports.
But with national energy generation and grids struggling to keep up with the growth, Bloomberg believes around 2.9 billion to 3.4 billion cubic feet per day could be attributed to on-site, self-generated energy. As a guide, that's around as much as the entire data center sector consumes today.
The true warning comes from that the remaining consumption, provided by the grid, could ultimately lead to higher gas prices over the next 10 years. That, and the estimated 1 million metric tons of additional greenhouse gas emissions per day predicted by the data.
Importantly, BloombergNEF gas market analyst Henry Eaton stressed that these projections include "fairly large" error bars due to the sheer number of variables and unpredictability, meaning that actual consumption could be substantially higher (or lower).
More broadly, another recent study revealed that America's data centers could consume a combined 426 TWh by as soon as 2030, with Moody's analysts pushing the importance of both new energy generation but also transmission infrastructure to connect campuses and homes nationally with cleaner and more reliable energy.
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