The rapid development of big data and smart technology in the natural gas industry requires timely and accurate forecasting of natural gas consumption on different time horizons. In this work, we propose a robust hybrid hours-ahead gas consumption method by integrating Wavelet Transform, RNN-structured deep learning and Genetic Algorithm. The Wavelet Transform is used to reduce the complexity of the forecasting tasks by decomposing the original series of gas loads into several sub-components. The RNN-structured deep learning method is built up via combining a multi-layer Bi-LSTM model and a LSTM model. The multi-layer Bi-LSTM model can comprehensively capture the features in the sub-components and the LSTM model is used to forecast the future gas consumption based on these abstracted features. To enhance the performance of the RNN-structured deep learning model, Genetic Algorithm is employed to optimize the structure of each layer in the model. Besides, the dropout technology is applied in this work to overcome the potential problem of overfitting. In this case study, the effectiveness of the developed method is verified from multiple perspective, including graphical examination, mathematical errors analysis and model comparison, on different data sets. (C) 2019 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.