North Americans are absolutely right to complain about the rapid run up in natural gas pricing in such a short period of time, however compared to Europeans we have absolutely no reason to complain. Our good friend Alan Hick, is CHTA Secretary/Editor of Hotline, the largest heat treat publication in the UK (CHTA stands for Contract Heat Treatment Association, an organization of commercial heat treaters in the country-their counterpart in North American would be MTI).

In the March 2022 issue of “Hotline” 299410 Hotline Newsletter No167.indd (chta.co.uk) Alan speaks about energy pricing and CHTA’s efforts to influence costs and point out to everybody who will listen how crucial heat treating is to manufacturing (and much to his credit he references “The Monty Heat Treat News”). His article makes for very interesting reading and we would suggest reading it however this graph in a nutshell sums up the differences in the cost of natural gas in Europe as opposed to North America and shocking is the only way to describe it. This graph (which is in USD) shows the relative costs from 2014 to late 2021 and as you can see while there have been fluctuations the two lines show similar ups and downs (American costs are in blue, European costs in black). However starting in early 2021 European cost increased wildly and we would imagine that given the current political situation the spread is becoming even more pronounced.

Can you imagine European heat treaters paying 6 times North American prices? Amazing.

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