Dutch wholesale gas prices inched up on Monday morning amid concerns about gas supplies via Ukraine, while British prices rose due to outages in the UK Continental Shelf.
The benchmark front-month contract at the Dutch TTF hub TRNLTTFMc1 inched up by 0.20 euro to 40.60 euros per megawatt hour (MWh) by 0833 GMT, LSEG data showed.
Demand is expected to be flat across continental Europe, with strong French nuclear availability and high solar output.
Nominations, or requests for Norwegian imports are steady, while total north-west Europe liquefied natural gas (LNG) send-out is expected to rise by 131 gigawatt hours/day (GWh/d) to 1,325GWh/d due to stronger nominations at Netherlands’ Eemshaven and Belgium’s Zeebrugge, LSEG data showed.
“We asses that the risk of military operations in Sudzha continue to be a bullish support factor,” said LSEG gas analyst Tomasz Marcin Kowalski.
Video posted on Ukrainian media outlets on Friday showed Ukrainian soldiers in control of a gas measuring facility in the town of Sudzha inside Kursk region. Reuters could not immediately verify the video and the General Staff of the Ukrainian military had no comment.
However, Russia’s Gazprom said it would send 39.6 million mcm of gas to Europe via Ukraine on Monday compared to 39.3 mcm on Sunday.
Christoph Halser, gas and LNG analyst at Rystad Energy, said the market has largely priced in the potential for halted flows and the potential for Russia to exert market pressure by stopping has them has much reduced since the energy crisis of 2022 as Europe has reduced its dependency on Russian gas so much.
The British day-ahead price TRGBNBPD1 was 5.00 pence higher at 87.00 pence per therm.
UK Continental Shelf production is impacted by outages. The Bacton Seal terminal outage has been extended by two days until Aug. 13, while Bacton Perenco terminal has reduced supply by 10 million cubic metres (mcm) a day and the Cygnus field has a reduction of 6 mcm/day.
St Fergus Mobil will be shut from Aug 18-Sept. 24.
In the European carbon market CFI2Zc1, the benchmark contract rose by 2.33 euro to 72.47 euros a metric ton.
Source: Reuters (Reporting by Nina Chestney)