June 30 (Reuters) – U.S. natural gas futures plunged about 17% on Thursday to a three-month low as the shutdown of Freeport LNG’s liquefied natural gas (LNG) export plant in Texas allowed utilities to stockpile more fuel than expected even as hotter weather had generators burning more gas to keep air conditioners humming. The market extended earlier storage-related losses of around 9% after U.S. pipeline safety regulators said they found unsafe conditions at Freeport and that they will not allow the plant to restart until an outside analysis is complete. read more Freeport, the second-biggest U.S. LNG export plant, was consuming about 2 billion cubic feet per day (bcfd) of gas before it shut on June 8, so the expected 90-day outage would leave around 180 billion cubic feet (bcf) of gas available to the U.S. market. The U.S. Energy Information Administration (EIA) said utilities added 82 bcf of […]