Spain’s natural gas imports fell 8.3% in October compared to the same month a year earlier as the country’s gas storage remains at full capacity, data from Spanish grid operator Enagas showed.

Europe’s gas inventories have climbed to record highs, as a warm start to autumn has delayed the onset of heating demand while high prices affected industrial demand. Underground natural gas storage in Spain is currently 100% full, Enagas said.

Last month, Spainimported the equivalent of 33,838 gigawatt-hours (GWh)of natural gas, down from 36,898 GWh a year earlier, according to Enagas. In the third quarter of last year, Europe’s LNG imports rose massively after Russia’s invasion of Ukraine upended energy markets. At the time, Spain was the bloc’s second-largest importer after France.

Algeria supplied more than 46% of the gas imported to Spain in October, by far the largest supplier. It was followed by the United States. Liquefied natural gas (LNG) coming from Russia made up 12.6% of the total.

The European Union has a goal of weaning itself off Russian fossil fuels by 2027, but the bloc is still paying large sums for Russian LNG. Fears of price spikes mean that the EU has no plan in the short term to ban Russian LNG imports.

LNG shipments represented 67.6% of the total imports, while purchases through pipelines represented 32.4%, Enagas said.

On the demand side, the use of gas by industrial, commercial and domestic customers rose roughly 22% from a year earlier.
Source: Reuters (Reporting by Jakub Olesiuk, Editing by Inti Landauro, Pietro Lombardi and Andrea Ricci)