Europe’s benchmark gas price rose again on Monday to its highest level since 2022. The front month contract at the Dutch Title Transfer Facility rose 2.1 percent in early Amsterdam trading to 95.73 euros per megawatt hour, OilPrice reported, extending a 7 percent gain last week, as temperatures fell and heating demand expectations rose. The Guardian, reporting the same morning, also put the benchmark at a four year high. The price is equivalent to more than 30 dollars per million British thermal units, roughly ten times the United States Henry Hub price in the latest site market tables.
The driver is storage, not a single new outage. Gas Infrastructure Europe data put European Union storage at 74.62 percent full as of October 25, well below the five year average of about 86 percent for this point in the year, and several countries began withdrawing gas from storage last week as temperatures dropped. Saxo Bank head of commodity strategy Ole Hansen put total inventories at about 845 terawatt hours, roughly 100 terawatt hours below a year ago, a shortfall he described as equivalent to the energy carried by more than 80 large liquefied natural gas carriers.
Supply from the Persian Gulf remains the missing piece. Qatari LNG cargoes, a core source for both Europe and Asia before the war with Iran, have slowed to a trickle over the past seven months as traffic through the Strait of Hormuz has been disrupted, leaving the two regions competing for alternative spot cargoes. OilPrice noted that liquefied natural gas flows have not recovered in any meaningful way even where oil exports from the Middle East have partly resumed.
The risk now compounds with the calendar. The withdrawal season has started with the buffer already thin, so every cold week draws directly on a stockpile that is about 100 terawatt hours light, and every day without Hormuz transits removes the cargoes that would normally rebuild it. Prices remain far below the peaks of the 2022 crisis, but the direction into winter is set by the same combination that drove that crisis: low storage, colder weather and a contested supply route.