The natural gas market in Europe suddenly got a lot tighter this week, with two unexpected supply outages wreaking havoc across the continent, forcing Italy to declare a state of emergency.
The first incident that made big headlines was the crack in the Forties pipeline in the North Sea, which caused Brent crude oil prices to immediately spike. The outage of the crucial 450,000 bpd pipeline sent a jolt through the oil market and was felt around the world, not only because it interrupted oil flows but also because of the influence the pipeline system has on the Brent futures contract.
But the shuttering of the pipeline system will also affect natural gas.
At least two UK natural gas fields – the Elgin-Franklin and Britannia – were forced to shut down because of the outage at the Forties system. Those two fields produce a combined 20 million cubic meters of natural gas per day (million cu m/d), according to S&P Global Platts. Add in maintenance at the North Morecambe field and the UK is currently down 27 million cu m/d.
Meanwhile, some unrelated problems due to a power outage at the Norwegian Troll field in the North Sea – Europe’s largest offshore natural gas field – knocked an additional 47 million cu m/d offline, although only for a brief period of time. Piling on, the Netherlands had to briefly reduce gas shipments to the UK because of problems with a compression station.
Because the UK doesn’t have nearly as much storage capacity for gas as parts of continental Europe, the disruptions will immediately translate into higher prices. UK natural gas futures for front-month contracts spiked by 23 percent to $9.86/MMBtu, according to Bloomberg. That is the highest price in four years. Wood Mackenzie estimates the UK may have lost the equivalent of about 10 percent of winter demand from the outage at the Forties pipeline system.
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