Breaking news: British natural gas deficit warning issued

British natural gas grid operator National Grid issued a gas deficit warning on Thursday morning.

Forecast supply for the day at 05:00 London time open was almost 48 million cubic metres (mcm) short of expected demand, but an hour later the deficit had increased to almost 54mcm.

The operator was forecasting daily demand at 395mcm, suggesting around 14% of consumption could not be met based on nominations at that time.

National Grid said “it would consider any user offers for single or multiple day trades” via the over-the-counter (OTC) market, or through the balancing platform, which is known as the on-the-day commodity market (OCM).

Only OTC trades will be possible for shippers who are not on the OCM. National Grid said it will also accept demand side response offers via the OCM.

The warning was issued following an outage at the South Hook LNG terminal, where all 60mcm/day of capacity came offline for an unplanned outage.

This was on top of a new Norwegian outage at the SEGAL point, operated by Norway’s Gassco, which feeds into St Fergus that was cutting flows by 18mcm/day.

Gassco’s Kollsnes processing plant was also still under outage, although the curtailment had been reduced to 16mcm/day, having been 58mcm/day at times on Monday. tom.marzec-manser@icis.com

More to follow…

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