Europe’s benchmark natural gas price jumped by 2% at opening in Amsterdam on Monday, extending the 7% weekly gain from last week, as concerns mount that the gas withdrawal season has started amid no signs that Qatar’s LNG flows would return anytime soon.
The front-month price at the Dutch Title Transfer Facility (TTF), the benchmark for Europe’s gas trading, rose by 2.1% to as much as $107.40 (95.73 euros) per megawatt-hour (MWh) early on Monday, reaching its highest level since 2022.
The European natural gas price is now at its highest levels since the autumn of 2022, when Europe faced the first winter without most of the Russian pipeline gas supply. The current price is also equivalent to more than $30 per million British thermal units (MMBtu).
The TTF price rallied by 7% last week as several EU countries began withdrawing gas from storage amid lower temperatures.
EU storage sites were only 74.62% full as of October 25, per data from Gas Infrastructure Europe. That’s well below the five-year average of about 86% for this time of the year so close to the start of the heating season.
European gas storage levels are at a historical low this autumn as the Middle East crisis has cut off most LNG flows out of the Persian Gulf. Cargoes from Qatar, which was the world’s second-largest LNG exporter before the Iran war, have slowed to a trickle in the past seven months, leaving Europe and Asia in a fierce competition for alternative spot supply.
LNG flows have not recovered in any meaningful way, as oil exports from the Middle East have, hiking European and Asian prices to the highest level since 2022.
As winter approaches, upside risks to prices rise with every day in which LNG cargoes don’t transit the Strait of Hormuz.
“To put the supply challenge into perspective, European gas inventories currently stand at around 845 TWh, approximately 100 TWh below the level recorded at this time last year,” Ole Hansen, Head of Commodity Strategy at Saxo Bank, said in a Friday note.
“That shortfall alone is equivalent to the energy carried by more than 80 large LNG carriers, highlighting the scale of additional imports required to rebuild the buffer ahead of winter.”
By Tsvetana Paraskova for Oilprice.com
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