Publishing papers in the area of forecasting natural gas consumption has begun in the middle of last century and led to a tremendous surge in research activities in the past decade. This paper presents a state-of-the-art survey of forecasting natural gas consumption. Purpose of this paper is to provide analysis and synthesis of published research in this area from beginning to the end of 2010, insights on applied area, used data, models and tools to achieve usable results, in order to be helpful base for future researchers. (C) 2011 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.