And storage has always been part of the natural gas system.  We store gas produced in summer for use in winter.

The problem we are facing is that we're using more and more natural gas in summer, raising the possibility that we may run out in the winter.  

Odd isn't it that energy producers can "control' oil prices but not natural gas prices.

Natural gas is different from oil in two fundamental ways - first, the north american market is mostly isolated from the rest of the world, so both supply and demand is local. The weather, traditionally cold or warm winters, but increasingly hot or normal summers, have a major effect on demand.
Second, the pipelines from the major producing areas are not sufficient to supply the major consuming regions even during a normal winter, much less in a colder than normal one. For this reason, each region must store large quantities in underground caverns to meet seasonal demand. The caverns are supposed to be full by late fall to meet winter demand. The concern last winter was that, with lesser supply available following the hurricanes, there might be insufficient ng in storage to meet winter need, so utilities bid against each other to fill their own caverns. This activity has nothing to do with greedy suppliers, who did indeed enjoy the higher prices, but entirely resulted from worried utilities. The warm winter, combined with pride-incuded cutbacks by major industrial users (eg fertilizer makers and brick/glass manufacturers, who temporarily laid off thousands of workers) resulted in much less consumption than expected at the onset of winter.

As an aside, the hundreds of natural gas producing companies have been in an absolute frenzy in renting drilling rigs and drilling for gas as fast as they can to meet the nations's need for ng, to the extent that over 85% of all us rigs are drilling for ng and only 15% are drilling for oil, in spite of record world oil prices. Of course, if ng falls sufficiently in price while oil remains elevated, some of these rigs will switch back, which could result in higher ng prices in the future.