European natural gas prices climbed to their highest in nearly four years on Friday. The Dutch TTF contract for December delivery rose 4.9 percent to 102.78 euros per megawatt hour, after first closing above 100 euros on Wednesday, and the front month print reached 103.10 euros in session reporting. The benchmark gained roughly 40 percent in October, its fourth consecutive monthly increase.
The driver is the storage position, not a single supply outage. EU underground storage sits near 75 percent full, the lowest level for this point in the season since records began in 2011, and about 8 percentage points below the same point last year. Hormuz disruption hampered Europe’s summer refill campaign, and several member states have already flipped to net withdrawals, weeks earlier than a normal heating season start.
Britain moved with the continent. The UK month ahead contract jumped about 5.5 percent to 256.47 pence per therm on Friday, a gain of about 40 percent over the month, matching levels last seen in the 2022 energy crisis.
The risk framing from the supply side is stark. Gazprom chief executive Alexey Miller said on October 30 that European prices had already exceeded 1,200 dollars per thousand cubic metres in October and could reach a record 2,500 dollars in a severely cold winter, TASS reported. That is a Russian state company talking its own market, and it is carried here as a claim, not a forecast. The independent version of the same point came from BlackRock analysts on October 27: already low inventories leave European energy prices, up about 170 percent this year, vulnerable to further increases if winter is cold.