Fueling Prosperity: How Small Businesses Rely on Natural Gas
Happy Small Business Month! There are approximately 33.2 million small businesses in America, collectively employing 61.7 million Americans, or 46.4% of the workforce. Nearly every single business in the U.S. is a small business—that’s right, more than 99.9% of American businesses are small businesses. For tens of millions of Americans, their finances, lives, and dreams are bound up in the small businesses they own or work for. With a typical small business profit margin of around 10%, lowering costs is key to helping small businesses thrive. For untold millions of those businesses, natural gas is the difference between thriving and struggling to make a profit.
The low cost of natural gas has saved American commercial and industrial customers half a trillion dollars in the past decade. These savings can take many forms for small businesses. For instance, 87% of full-service restaurants rely on natural gas appliances to serve their customers.
New York restauranteur Stratis Morfogen, when asked about how important natural gas stoves are to his restaurants, had this to say: “With electric stoves, first of all, our bills will go six times higher. And then on top of that, our productivity drops.”
The average full-service restaurant has a profit margin of between five and ten percent. A six-fold increase in the cost of cooking would be massive. It’s fair to say that without natural gas, the restaurant industry would be unrecognizable – and untold numbers of family owned restaurants would have to massively hike prices or risk going out of businesses.
Beyond the energy itself, natural gas provides the feedstock behind many products American small businesses rely on. Natural gas provides both the feedstock to make nitrogen fertilizers, and much of the energy used in the process. Without synthetic fertilizers made from natural gas, family farms, which often have profit margins under 10%, would see their yields plumet and costs soar (Up to 50% of global crop yields today are attributable to fertilizers made from natural gas – billions of people are alive today who could never have lived if not for the process that makes it possible to turn natural gas into low-cost fertilizer). The existence of natural gas fertilizers keeps food prices lower, improving the profit margins of millions of family-owned small businesses.
Does your small business rely on cloud computing services? While the cloud might be everywhere, the infrastructure that supports it is concentrated in large data centers. Each of those data centers needs massive amounts of energy. Only natural gas guarantees the reliability they need to avoid a potentially catastrophic outage, ensuring service to their customers while keeping energy costs, one of the highest potential costs for data centers, low.
For millions of small businesses, one of the biggest considerations is the cost and availability of energy. Any kind of manufacturing needs safe, affordable and reliable energy – and with natural gas expected to remain between half and a third the price of electricity through 2050, access to natural gas is a lifeline for millions of businesses. The reliability of natural gas is crucial for facilities that can’t afford to lose access to energy. While the average electric customer experiences an outage every year, only one natural gas customer in 650 will have a service outage annually.
America runs on small businesses – and small businesses run on natural gas. We’re proud to play our part as an industry in fueling the small businesses that make America special, innovative and prosperous.