Europe Gas: Prices firm on Norwegian outage and cooler weather

Dutch and British gas prices rose on Thursday morning on an unplanned outage at Norway’s Troll gas field and cooler weather, though healthy storage inventories and strong liquefied natural gas (LNG) flows curbed increases.

The Dutch December contract TRNLTTFMc1 was up 1 euro at 47.50 euros per megawatt hour (MWh) by 1005 GMT, LSEG data showed.

“Demand is a bit higher for tomorrow and the market is reacting to that. We also have the small Troll outage to add to market worries, making it a bullish day,” one European gas trader said.

Troll’s unplanned maintenance scheduled for today will affect supply by 5.5 million cubic meters per day (mcm/d), barring any extensions, LSEG data showed .

LSEG analyst Yuriy Onyshkiv said that gas demand for heating and for power on the day ahead is expected to add 606 gigawatt hours per day (GWh/D) on the day ahead.
Supply remains largely unchanged and Norway will add about 5 mcm per day of production after the Troll outage ends tomorrow, Onyshkiv said.

However, these factors are not expected to ease the tightening caused by higher demand, he added.

Europe’s gas storage sites are now 99.4% full, down from a high of 99.63% earlier this month, the latest Gas Infrastructure Europe data shows.

In Britain, the day-ahead contract was up by 2 pence at 108 p/therm while the December contract TRGBNBPMc1 fell by 0.35 pence to 116.85 p/therm.

Peak wind power generation in Britain was forecast at 4.85 gigawatts (GW) on Thursday, rising to 8.31 GW on Friday, out of total metered capacity of about 23 GW, Elexon data showed.

In the European carbon market, the benchmark contract CFI2Zc1 fell by 0.41 euros to 79.33 euros a metric ton.
Source: Reuters (Reporting by Marwa Rashad, Editing by David Goodman)