Methane hydrates: Correlation
Prices it moves with, and why
Methane hydrates are ice-like deposits of gas under seabeds and permafrost. None is produced commercially, so their value depends on gas prices, the high cost of stable extraction, and climate risk from leaked methane.
No public price Methane hydrates has no public monthly price series: No commercial production; only test wells.What its price moves with
Hydrates would be produced as natural gas, so gas prices set their potential value. Japan and China have run hydrate production tests, and India has drilled to map deposits, mainly to secure gas supply, not because current prices pay for it.
Not enough overlapping price history to measure.Importers such as Japan and India pay for LNG shipped from abroad. The cost of LNG is the benchmark that domestic hydrate gas would need to beat to be worth producing.
Not enough overlapping price history to measure.Shale gas and other unconventional sources are already cheap and large, which has delayed hydrate development. Hydrates would compete with these for the same buyers and drilling services. Hydrate extraction would need similar wells.
Not enough overlapping price history to measure.One method injects carbon dioxide to swap with methane in the hydrate lattice, storing CO2 while freeing gas. This was tested in Alaska, but the cost of CO2 supply matters for the method.
Not enough overlapping price history to measure.How to read these numbers
Correlation of monthly changes (the number in the coloured pill) compares how much each price moved, month by month, since 2006 or the first month both series exist. It runs from −1 to +1: near +1 the two usually rise and fall in the same months, near 0 there is no link, and a negative number means they tend to move in opposite directions. Above 0.7 is strong, 0.4 to 0.7 moderate, 0.2 to 0.4 weak.
12-month changes compare year-on-year moves, which shows whether two prices share the same cycles even when the month-to-month noise differs.
Price function is a straight-line fit of the two prices on logarithmic scales: price ≈ k × (partner price)β. β is how much this price moves, in per cent, for a 1% move in the partner over the whole period, and R² is the share of the variation the fit explains. Two prices that both drift up with inflation can fit well without any real link, so read it together with the monthly correlation.
Lead or lag checks whether the monthly correlation is clearly higher when one price is shifted by 1 to 6 months.
Correlation is not cause. The reasons on each card explain the economic link; the numbers show how strongly it has shown up in prices. Proxy series are US producer price indexes or related prices and can blur the real link.
Data: World Bank Commodity Price Data (Pink Sheet), October 2026; US Bureau of Labor Statistics producer price indexes, IMF primary commodity prices and US EIA prices via FRED, Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis, retrieved November 2026. Calculations by this site.