Here's where home heating will cost more this winter

The temperature has been dropping across a wide swath of the U.S. Parts of Montana are even expecting snow over the next week.

That means it’s time for people in those parts of the country to at least start thinking about turning the heat on at home. Just how painful that will be depends on location and what kind of energy is used.

“Most Americans are not going to experience the same winter economy,” said Teri Viswanath, lead economist for power, energy, and water at CoBank.

If you use natural gas and live close to the supply — say in, Oklahoma, Texas, Louisiana, or Wyoming, you’re in luck.

“Your heating bill might be lower this year, and I think that's good news,” Viswanath said.

It all comes down to the U.S.’s massive natural gas supply, said Tom Seng, an energy finance professor at Texas Christian University. “We can't export any more than we currently can. So we do have a surplus of natural gas right now.”

That also keeps prices down for the propane market — it’s a derivative of natural gas and oil.

“We could kind of say we have an abundance of natural gas, and we're producing record amounts of oil, so we also have an abundance of of propane,” Seng said.

So that’s all great. But say you live in New England where a lot of homes use heating oil, which is basically diesel.

“It's going to be a much more expensive winter. It potentially could be, they could have record-high heating oil bills,” Seng said.

The federal forecast estimates a 34% price jump from last year. Mark Wolfe, executive director of the National Energy Assistance Directors’ Association thinks it could be more if the wars in Ukraine and Middle East continue.

“Because right now prices are really high and we really don't know what will happen to them,” he said.

Wolfe is additionally tracking the cost of heating homes with electricity, which will also be spendier this winter.

“Utilities have been rebuilding their distribution system, the wires, and the generation capacity, and that's expensive,” he said.

There’s one other factor that could change all of these prices: weather. This winter is supposed to be warmer, especially in the north, thanks to this year’s huge El Niño.