Europe’s gas price on Monday jumped to its highest level this year following an outage at a gas processing plant in Norway, highlighting the increasingly pivotal nature of Norwegian supplies after the continent largely weaned itself off Russian imports.
The price of the European benchmark TTF surged past €38 per megawatt hour on the Intercontinental Exchange, up more than 13 per cent, before falling back to €36.80. The rise to the highest prices since early December is the latest sign that markets remain on the edge despite near-record levels of gas storage in Europe.
Norway is now the single largest supplier of natural gas to Europe, and accounted for 30 per cent of the bloc’s supplies last year, after most pipeline deliveries from Russia were cut following Moscow’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine in 2022. Unplanned outages in Norway increasingly tend to cause a sharp reaction in the market.