Why gas is really cooking

Green and growing, this is one stock that will make everyone happy.

Now you might find the idea of gas unexciting, and until very recently gas stocks were about as attractive as, say, Carlton’s Brendan Fevola

Gas is clean. If Chinese power stations ran on it rather than coal you might have been able to see more of the Olympic city rather than the soupy blur that passed for greater Beijing. Gas is cheap. It is priced roughly at a 17% discount to oil (and that’s changing, but more on that later). Environmentalists love it – or at least praise it as an alternative to coal and nuclear power.

Gas outperformed all other environmentally friendly stocks over the past year and environmental stocks outperformed the market. Here are the numbers. While most companies struggled to increase profits, gas companies were among the dramatic outperformers – profits doubled at Envestra and Arrow Gas. Boosted substantially by gas companies, 20 of the 24 environmental stocks on the ASX increased profits.

BusinessDay