Dutch and British gas prices were mostly lower on Thursday morning as Norwegian pipeline gas recovered after an outage at the Nyhamna gas plant.

The day-ahead contract at the Dutch TTF hub was down 0.23 euros at 28.35 euros per megawatt hour (MWh) at 0956 GMT, LSEG data showed.

The benchmark front-month contract was flat at 28.05 euros/MWh.

In Britain, the day-ahead contract was 1.15 pence lower at 70.00 pence per therm, while the weekend contract slipped by 0.75 pence to 70.00 p/therm.

LSEG analyst Ulrich Weber said that Norwegian piped export nominations are rising again by a total of 12 million cubic metres (mcm) per day (mcm) to 319 mcm/day.

The Nyhamna plant is ramping up send-out after an outage caused by external supply problems but an outage at the Troll field has been extended by a day and the impact raised to 16 mcm/day from 5 mcm/day.

“We still see risk related to the outage at Troll. Total Norwegian flows have still 20-30 mcm/d to go to return to the average January levels,” he added.

Comfortable storage levels and above normal temperatures provided support to the market.

Europe’s gas stores are currently 68.29% full, the latest data from Gas Infrastructure Europe showed.

Gas-for-power demand in Britain is also set to decrease as wind power output should recover from very low levels.

Strong levels of renewables generation for wind and solar in Germany also seems to be exerting downward pressure on prices, analysts at Engie EnergyScan said.

“But this is expected to drop from tomorrow so prices could find support at some point,” they added.

In the European carbon market, the benchmark contract CFI2Zc1 was down 0.33 euros to 63.25 euros a metric ton.
Source: Reuters (Reporting By Marwa Rashad; editing by Nina Chestney)