There are many IT tools available on the market that carry out various types of forecasts in the gas industry. Programming evolves with the availability and capability of computers. IT tools support the user in engineering calculations, but also present the obtained results in an interesting visualization, e.g. in the form of interactive charts. The software can support making business decisions, which, in turn, can be used as business intelligence. In the era of digitization, huge metadata of measurements are created, so conducting data analyzes in the energy sector is very common. Moreover, rapidly evolving artificial intelligence creates new opportunities. The article presents a sample analysis of calculations using RStudio, an integrated development environment for the R language, a programming language for statistical calculations and graphics. The aim of the article is to present the possibility of using R language software to make a forecast and to determine the quality of forecasts. The article aims to present the possibility of making forecasts based on mathematical models available in R packages and the possibilities offered by the forecasting platform to readers. The article presents the U.S. market and has a particular focus on Natural Gas Residential Consumption in Pennsylvania (publicly available data from the U.S. Energy Information Administration). This dataset represents the monthly consumption of natural gas between 2015 and 2020. Forecasts were presented over a span of 12 months.

As is well known, gas consumption and its prices depends on many factors including local factors, geopolitics, the development of the gas transport infrastructure (including liquefied natural gas), distribution and extraction costs – for example unconventional deposits (e.g. shale gas). The global gas market depends primarily on the economic relations between large gas producers and importers e.g. US-China, Middle East/US – Russia etc. (Olayele 2015). In individual countries, the price is also dependent on concluded contracts and delivery directions. Also it should be mentioned that the gas consumption depends on weather conditions, type of day of the year (holiday, business day, month) and economic situation (Kosowski et. al 2010). What impact has the appearance of the COVID-19 epidemic had on the European natural gas market?

The analyzed research problem concerned, in particular, two areas: gas consumption and its prices, in selected European countries in the aspect of the spread of the COVID-19 epidemic with reference to historical data from 2016–2019. Seven European countries belonging to the European Network of Transmission System Operators for Gas (ENTSOG) were selected, for which the highest inland consumption of natural gas by country was observed in the last year. The countries are presented in order or consumption: Germany, the United Kingdom, Italy, France, the Netherlands, Spain, Poland. The data has been downloaded from transmission system operators (TSOs) for each of these countries.

Furthermore the article showed information about the dates of governments restrictions (lockdown), LNG contract volumes, injection/withdrawal volumes (storage).