A Price Back at 2022 Highs

The Dutch benchmark futures contract stood at €101.82/MWh on October 30, up 4% on the session and about 8% on the week. No level that high had been touched since the shock triggered by the halt of Russian pipeline gas deliveries. But the configuration differs: the strain today comes from a margin deficit rather than a single rupture.

Storage Cut by Eleven Points

EU reservoirs were only 74.89% full on October 29, against a five-year average of about 86% at the same time of year. That gap of roughly eleven points matters all the more because the withdrawal season has begun in several countries: storage should barely rise any further. The gas missing from the tanks will therefore have to arrive as continuous flow all winter.

Supply Slips Away

This is where the mechanism seizes up. QatarEnergy has extended force majeure on its LNG deliveries through the end of the year, and fears of an escalation in the Middle East weigh on cargoes transiting the Strait of Hormuz. Europe and Asia find themselves without assured contractual supply. Several unplanned outages in Norway add to this. To attract cargoes, European buyers must outbid each other, which drives the TTF upward.

What the Pipelines Show

Physical flow readings point the same way. At Emden, the entry point for Norwegian volumes into Germany, throughput fell from 432.0 million kWh/d on October 23 to 127.7 million on October 24, roughly 70% less. At Oberkappel, on the Austro-German border, output dropped from 134.3 to 32.7 million kWh/d, a decline of about 76%.

The Limits of Interpretation

These figures call for caution. Two days do not make a trend: maintenance, a nomination lag or an incomplete day can produce such gaps, and the Zevenaar entry data is missing. The flows date from October 24, the prices from October 30, and no long TTF series is available. The link between the two therefore remains an inference. Day-ahead electricity prices on October 23 also remind us that gas strain does not explain everything: €227.27/MWh in Switzerland and €157.93 in Portugal, but €23.07 in Finland and €33.90 in West Denmark.

A Safety Margin Rather Than a Panic

The reasonable conclusion is that the market is pricing the scarcity of a margin: storage below its norm, uncertain LNG and a less reliable Norway leave little room for the unexpected. What happens next will depend on Gulf flows and the regularity of Norwegian deliveries, two variables this file cannot anticipate.

This article was written with the assistance of artificial intelligence and verified by our editorial team.