EU storage facilities are less full than at any point since records began in 2011, gas costs twice as much as it did a year ago, and the shortest way out of the trap once again leads through the Kremlin
On Monday, September 14, 2026, the October futures contract at the Dutch TTF hub broke above $1,000 per thousand cubic meters for the first time in nearly four years, or about €84 per megawatt-hour. European gas had been more expensive only in December 2022, when the continent was living through the first autumn of its gas war with Moscow. Back then, the crisis had a face. Today it does not. Russia now supplies about 12 percent of the European Union’s imported gas, compared with nearly 45 percent on the eve of the invasion of Ukraine. Nord Stream, its pipes ruptured, lies on the bottom of the Baltic Sea, while all 27 EU member states have bound themselves by law to end their dependence on Russian gas for good in the autumn of 2027. Europe won the gas war against the Kremlin. Four years after that victory, it is entering the heating season with its emptiest storage facilities in a decade and a half.
The leverage has moved. It no longer sits in Moscow. It now floats in a strait roughly 33 kilometers wide between Iran and Oman, through which 130 to 140 vessels passed every day before the war and through which Europe received almost none of its gas. It is this strait, not a valve on the Russian border, that will determine how much a German chemical company, an Italian family in Lombardy, and a Polish municipal heating operator pay for warmth in January 2027.
A Record Brussels Does Not Boast About
The figures come from Gas Infrastructure Europe, the association of European gas infrastructure operators, and they are difficult to dispute because the data are supplied directly by storage owners. As of September 28, EU underground storage facilities were 71.16 percent full. The five-year average for that date is 15.6 percentage points higher; last year’s level was 11 points higher. For late September, this is the worst figure on record. About 78 billion cubic meters of gas are currently in storage, 13 billion less than a year earlier and less than in any autumn since 2013.
Russian state agencies, recalculating the same database, arrived at 71.5 percent and 78.3 billion cubic meters. Moscow has every interest in presenting the bleakest possible picture of Europe’s difficulties, and when its calculations coincide with Brussels’ figures to within tenths of a percentage point, there is simply no room left for exaggeration.
For comparison, at the beginning of October 2022, at the height of the confrontation with Gazprom, European storage facilities were nearly 90 percent full. The European Union was buying gas at almost any price, and in late August 2022 TTF surged to a record €340 per megawatt-hour. The sums spent were staggering, but Europe entered winter with full reserves. This autumn is the mirror image: money was saved, storage was not filled.
Forecasts for November 1, the formal start of the heating season, differ only slightly. American commodity analysts expect 74 percent. British consultants were projecting 76 percent as early as June, and the industry has not become more optimistic since. The spread is two percentage points; the direction is the same. The target that the European Commission itself reduced from 90 to 80 percent is unattainable at the current injection rate.
The hole was dug during the winter. The cold winter of 2025–26 drew almost 60 billion cubic meters out of storage, and by April 1, when the injection season began, facilities were only 28 percent full, holding roughly 31 billion cubic meters, the lowest level since 2018. Then two additional factors came into play, both originating in the Middle East.
The most revealing development came in September. European companies injected 7.8 billion cubic meters into storage, 15 percent more than a year earlier, and did so at the fastest pace in four years, while paying the highest prices since late 2022. They did not want to buy cheaply in summer. By autumn, they had to buy expensively.
How Europe Pays for Gas It Never Bought
The chronology can be reduced to a handful of dates. On February 28, 2026, the United States and Israel began a war against Iran. On March 4, QatarEnergy halted liquefied natural gas production and declared force majeure, invoking its right to suspend contractual obligations because of circumstances beyond its control. On March 18, Israel struck gas-processing facilities at South Pars, the field responsible for roughly 70 percent of Iranian gas production. Tehran responded with a strike on Qatar’s Ras Laffan, the world’s largest gas-liquefaction complex. Qatar’s Minister of State for Energy Affairs and QatarEnergy chief executive Saad Sherida Al-Kaabi later estimated that the country had lost 17 percent of its export capacity.
Qatar accounts for roughly one-fifth of global LNG trade, and 93 percent of its exports pass through the Strait of Hormuz. Since April, the U.S. fleet has been blockading Iranian ports, while Iran has kept the strait within its targeting range. In mid-June, with Pakistan mediating, the sides signed a memorandum on a 60-day ceasefire and a phased reopening of Hormuz, and on June 18 Qatari LNG carriers began moving toward the exit from the Gulf for the first time in months. The respite was brief. In July, the Qatari tanker Al Rekayyat was attacked in the strait; Doha blamed Iran. In early August, two more LNG carriers were hit, while almost simultaneously a drone attacked the Egyptian port of Damietta. Over six months of war, Qatari LNG exports fell by as much as 96 percent, while Doha’s lost revenue, according to available estimates, exceeded $24 billion.
The Gulf states have learned how to improvise with oil. Tankers make short dashes through the strait, often with their transponders switched off, then transfer crude to other vessels outside it. That trick does not work with gas. Methane chilled to minus 162 degrees Celsius cannot be transferred from ship to ship on the open sea with the same routine ease as oil. As a result, Qatari LNG has been trapped more effectively than any other energy commodity in the region.
Europe itself bought relatively little directly from Qatar: the overwhelming share of its LNG imports has long come from the United States. But the exceptions are painful. By late July, Italy’s Edison had failed to receive 24 Qatari cargoes, equivalent to roughly 3 billion cubic meters of gas, and in September the company said the force majeure had been extended until early November, effectively stretching to seven months. Pakistan and Bangladesh were notified that deliveries were canceled through the end of November, while buyers in India and South Korea were also affected by force majeure.
The mechanism through which Europe was hit is simple and brutal. Asian buyers deprived of Qatari gas entered the Atlantic spot market and began outbidding Europeans for the same American cargoes. The global LNG market has long become a single pool with a single price, determined by the most desperate buyer. Europeans paid for a war in which almost none of their own gas was directly involved.
Diplomacy has offered little reason for optimism. In late September, on the sidelines of the United Nations General Assembly in New York, Tehran proposed a new 60-day ceasefire and phased reopening of the strait in exchange for lifting the U.S. naval blockade of Iranian ports. No agreement was announced. At the same time, Iran and Oman are discussing navigation rules, but Tehran is linking them to a far broader bargain over sanctions and frozen assets. Iran no longer needs to close Hormuz in order to control it. It is enough to decide which vessel passes and which remains at the quay.
The Ceasefire That Misled Traders
Paradoxically, the greatest damage to European storage levels was caused not by the war itself, but by the June respite. The memorandum calmed the market, and the average price of the front-month futures contract in June fell to €44.94 per megawatt-hour. It looked like the perfect time to buy. Traders thought otherwise.
The economics of gas storage depend on the spread between summer and winter prices: a company buys cheaply in July, injects the gas underground, then sells it in January. In the summer of 2026, winter contracts were only slightly more expensive than summer contracts, turning storage into a money-losing business. At the same time, prices at European hubs fell low enough to make it more profitable for U.S. exporters to send cargoes to Asia. The market behaved perfectly rationally. The outcome was irrational.
Brussels largely encouraged this behavior. Back in March, the European Commission recommended that EU countries fill storage to 80 percent, or at least 75 percent in exceptional circumstances, instead of the customary 90 percent, in order to avoid driving prices higher through frantic purchasing. The reform of the Gas Storage Regulation, in force since September 2025, already allows the 90 percent threshold to be reached at any point between October 1 and December 1 and provides a ten-percentage-point flexibility margin in case of difficulties. In June, a Commission representative argued that inventories were roughly 10 percent below pre-crisis averages, but EU gas demand had fallen by about 17 percent, meaning there was no immediate threat. At the end of September, the Gas Coordination Group, established by EU countries and the Commission, concluded that supplies remained stable despite low inventories. Formally, all of this is true. Politically, it is a convenient formula that allows unpopular decisions to be postponed until the first hard freeze.
Europe has already learned what happens when strategic reserves are left to the market. In 2017, Britain’s Centrica announced the closure of the Rough storage facility off the Yorkshire coast, which accounted for roughly 70 percent of all UK gas storage capacity, because keeping it open had become commercially unprofitable. Only months later, in late February 2018, an Arctic anticyclone nicknamed the “Beast from the East” struck the country, and on March 1 the gas transmission operator National Grid issued an official gas deficit warning as intraday prices multiplied several times over. A market without a mandatory reserve saves on insurance right up until the day it needs it.
The Arithmetic of Cold: 80 Billion Versus 66
Europe heats homes with gas and generates electricity from it, so winter demand rises sharply, particularly during severe cold snaps and during what Germans call Dunkelflaute, the “dark doldrums,” when the sky is overcast, there is no wind, and solar panels and wind turbines produce almost nothing. On such days, the missing megawatts are supplied by gas-fired power plants, and imports cannot be increased in a single day as quickly as withdrawals from storage. Europe remembers what this looks like. On December 12, 2024, during another period of Dunkelflaute, German day-ahead electricity prices approached €1,000 per megawatt-hour in some hours.
The arithmetic is therefore straightforward. By November 1, European storage facilities will contain roughly 80 billion cubic meters. During the mild winters of 2022–23 and 2023–24, the EU withdrew 40 to 45 billion cubic meters from underground storage, and that volume would be more than sufficient. Two winters ago, 66 billion cubic meters were withdrawn; last winter, nearly 60 billion. If even the most recent scenario repeats itself, storage facilities will be close to empty by the end of March.
Europe will not literally freeze. It is wealthy, it has an extensive network of interconnectors, dozens of LNG import terminals, and the financial ability to outbid any buyer on the global market. Long before storage gauges in individual countries approach zero, another mechanism will take over: prices will surge, and quickly, especially if Hormuz remains only partially open. The principal risk this winter is not shortage. It is the bill.
European storage facilities, with total capacity of roughly 110 billion cubic meters including the United Kingdom, have long served as a virtual warehouse for the entire world. Outside the United States and China, no one has comparable capacity capable of absorbing a sudden winter surge in demand without a price explosion. If Europe’s warehouse empties, the shock wave will spread worldwide, and those least able to pay will feel it first.
Spring is even more dangerous. If inventories fall to critical levels by April 2027, Europe will need, according to industry analysts, roughly 30 billion cubic meters of additional gas between May and November to return to the 90 percent target. On paper, Europe has been fortunate: a major new wave of LNG supply is coming to market. In April 2026, Texas-based Golden Pass shipped its first cargo; its second train is due to start operating in the second half of the year and its third in the first half of 2027. Production is also increasing at Plaquemines in Louisiana, LNG Canada, and the Greater Tortue Ahmeyim project off the coasts of Senegal and Mauritania. The problem is that the entire increase in global supply over six months will amount to roughly the same 30 billion cubic meters. If Europe buys all of it, the new LNG wave will not drive prices down; it will merely keep them on a high plateau. A second consecutive summer of expensive gas would be a far more serious test for European industry than a single difficult winter.
One Hundred Billion Euros for Someone Else’s War
European Commissioner for Energy and Housing Dan Jorgensen, judging by his public statements, harbors few illusions. As early as April 21 in Madrid, he warned: “As long as we import more than €370 billion worth of fossil fuels every year, we remain far too vulnerable.” Ahead of the October meeting of EU energy ministers, his language became sharper: “Winter in Europe will be very difficult. We can only hope it will not be severe.” Then came a sentence that deserves to hang in the offices of every national regulator: “Hope, however, is a poor strategy.”
The most alarming element of Jorgensen’s rhetoric lies in a number. According to him, since the beginning of the war with Iran, the EU’s additional spending on fossil fuel imports has exceeded €100 billion, for exactly the same quantity of energy. “The energy crisis in Europe never actually ended,” the commissioner acknowledged, adding that the current price level must not be allowed to become the new normal. Europe already pays roughly three times more for gas than the United States and more than Asia. At around €84 per megawatt-hour, European gas costs industry more than $28 per million British thermal units, while an American competitor in Texas or Louisiana pays several times less for the same fuel.
Brussels has already begun paying this bill with its own principles. At a ministerial meeting in Dublin, Jorgensen proposed delaying the entry into force of new EU methane-emission reduction rules by one year in order, as he put it, to ease pressure on the market. “There is no doubt that we are facing a difficult winter,” he told reporters. The climate agenda, until recently almost sacrosanct for the Commission, has openly given way for the first time to the price of heating.
The second lever, reducing consumption, is politically toxic. In a letter to energy ministers, Jorgensen described the situation as a price crisis caused by a supply crisis and urged governments to consider measures to reduce demand for gas and electricity. The appeal came several months too late. European politicians are comfortable discussing security of supply and uncomfortable discussing conservation, because conservation hurts approval ratings. The same pattern played out in 2022: decisions were taken only after prices had already reached their peak.
Who benefits? First and foremost, American LNG exporters, for whom the spread between cheap feed gas at home and sales revenue in Rotterdam has become a gold mine. Norway, the EU’s second major supplier, is pumping gas near maximum capacity and earning windfall revenues that flow into the world’s largest sovereign wealth fund. Traders capable of redirecting tankers between the Atlantic and Pacific also win. And, paradoxically, so does Gazprom, as discussed below.
There are more losers. Europe’s energy-intensive industries, from chemicals to steel, are losing competitiveness for a third consecutive year. Households will see higher bills with a lag of several months, once regulated tariffs catch up with wholesale prices. The harshest blow will fall on poorer importers in South Asia. In 2022, Pakistan and Bangladesh were the first to experience rolling blackouts when wealthy Europe outbid them on the spot market. Today they have simultaneously lost Qatari gas under long-term contracts and their ability to afford replacement cargoes.
A Texas Pipeline Instead of a Siberian One
Europe paid for freedom from Russian dependence by acquiring a new dependence that Brussels prefers not to discuss. The United States accounts, depending on the methodology, for 57 to 63 percent of EU LNG imports, and in 2026 the figure is moving toward two-thirds. In July 2025, when the European Union struck a trade deal with the Donald Trump administration at Turnberry in Scotland, it pledged to purchase $750 billion worth of American energy over three years. At the time, this looked like a political concession in exchange for lower tariffs. Today it looks like the only realistic source of additional gas.
American gas is more reliable than Russian gas because Washington has not, so far, turned off Europe’s lights. Its weakness lies elsewhere: it is sold at a market price, and in a year of war the market price is whatever the most frightened buyer in Tokyo, Seoul, or Shanghai is prepared to pay. Dependence on Moscow was political. Europe depends on LNG in a different way, through price, and with Hormuz closed, the distinction between those two forms of dependence begins to shrink.
There is an irony in this story that would be difficult to invent deliberately. Golden Pass, the new Texas terminal that shipped its first cargo on April 22, 2026, is 70 percent owned by QatarEnergy and only 30 percent by ExxonMobil. While Ras Laffan stands partially damaged, Qatari capital is selling Europe gas from the shores of the Gulf of Mexico. Doha has learned to make money from its own force majeure.
The Caspian Corridor Europe Remembers Last
In European debates about winter energy security, almost no one mentions the route that has not failed Europe once in the past five years. The Southern Gas Corridor, roughly 3,500 kilometers long, runs from Azerbaijan’s offshore Caspian fields through Georgia and Turkey to southern Italy. Its European section, the Trans Adriatic Pipeline, or TAP, has been operating since December 31, 2020. According to Azerbaijan’s Ministry of Energy, as of October 1, 2026, 61.4 billion cubic meters of gas had been delivered to Europe through TAP, including 6 billion to Greece. In 2025, Azerbaijan supplied European customers with 12.8 billion cubic meters.
This route does not depend on Hormuz, does not cross the front line in Ukraine, and is not under sanctions. In 2022, when Gazprom was shutting down one pipeline after another to Europe, Azerbaijani gas continued flowing without interruption. Four years later, with Qatari tankers stranded in the Gulf, it continues to flow with the same consistency. President of Azerbaijan Ilham Aliyev has turned this into a coherent strategy: Azerbaijani gas is now purchased by 16 countries, 13 of them European. Since January 2026, supplies routed through Italy have reached Germany and Austria, while Germany’s state-owned SEFE has signed a ten-year contract under which volumes will gradually rise to 15 terawatt-hours, or about 1.5 billion cubic meters per year. Following completion of work at the Kipi compressor station in Greece, TAP gained an additional 1.2 billion cubic meters of long-term annual capacity as of January 1, 2026.
Honesty requires acknowledging the limitations. The Caspian cannot replace Qatar this winter, and no one in Baku has claimed otherwise. The memorandum signed by Azerbaijan and the European Commission in July 2022 provides for doubling supplies to the EU to 20 billion cubic meters by 2027, and in December 2023 in Nis, Serbia, President of Azerbaijan Ilham Aliyev reaffirmed that Baku would fulfill that commitment. European buyers, however, booked only an additional 1.2 billion cubic meters in TAP’s market test, while doubling flows would require roughly 10 billion. SOCAR and BP are only beginning construction in the third quarter of 2026 on a $2.9 billion compression project at the Shah Deniz field intended to sustain production.
The bottleneck is not in Baku. Back in November 2019, the European Investment Bank decided to stop financing fossil fuel projects from the end of 2021, making expansion of gas infrastructure almost politically improper for European money. For years, Europe demanded more gas from Azerbaijan while simultaneously refusing to invest in the pipelines needed to deliver it. Now, when every extra billion cubic meters requires Europe to outbid Asian competitors, that reluctance looks especially expensive.
The Kremlin Temptation: Why Rescue from the East Would Cost More Than Gas
The higher prices rise, the louder the voices in Europe calling for a reconsideration, or at least a postponement, of the break with Russian gas. Far-right parties in several EU countries openly lobby for renewed supplies, and against the backdrop of half-empty storage facilities, their argument about “cheap gas sacrificed to unnecessary principles” is finding an audience. Legally, however, that train has already left the station.
The REPowerEU gas regulation, EU/2026/261, was published in the Official Journal of the European Union on February 2 and entered into force on February 3, 2026. Short-term contracts for Russian LNG were banned from April 25, 2026, and short-term pipeline contracts from June 17. Beginning January 1, 2027, long-term LNG contracts will also be prohibited, cutting Novatek’s Yamal LNG off from the European market. Pipeline gas under long-term contracts will be banned from September 30, 2027, although a country with insufficiently filled storage facilities may postpone the deadline until the end of October 2027. The Council of the European Union gave final approval to the regulation on January 26. Hungary and Slovakia voted against it and announced that they would challenge it before the Court of Justice of the European Union. Hungarian Foreign Minister Peter Szijjarto announced his intention to file suit the same day, and his Slovak counterpart Juraj Blanar supported the move.
Russian gas, meanwhile, has not disappeared. In 2025, Gazprom supplied Europe with roughly 18 billion cubic meters, all of it through TurkStream, the only remaining pipeline route after Ukrainian transit ended on January 1, 2025. Flows increased in the summer of 2026. According to European operators, roughly 1.74 billion cubic meters passed through TurkStream in July, up from 1.26 billion in June, and in value terms Russian pipeline gas overtook Russian LNG in the EU import mix for the first time. Russian LNG still accounts for roughly 14 percent of the European Union’s liquefied gas imports, and beginning January 1 that share will have to be replaced in the middle of winter.
Restoring former volumes is physically impossible. Both strings of Nord Stream 1 and one string of Nord Stream 2 were destroyed by explosions on September 26, 2022. Yamal-Europe has been idle since 2022. Ukrainian transit is closed. The one intact string of Nord Stream 2 would require German certification, sanctions relief, and political suicide by whichever government in Berlin chose to approve it. Even if there were political will in Brussels and Moscow, gas would not begin flowing at the wave of a wand.
The main question is not even about pipelines. Would Vladimir Putin want to rescue Europe? In 2022, he imposed his own conditions on deliveries: by decree on March 31, he demanded payment in rubles, after which Poland, Bulgaria, Finland, and several other buyers were cut off from Russian gas. Nord Stream was halted in late August 2022 on the pretext of turbine maintenance. The Kremlin now behaves like a merchant who knows exactly what his product is worth. In September, the Russian president publicly predicted that gas prices in Europe could rise to $1,500 per thousand cubic meters. This is not an analyst’s forecast. It looks more like a price list. Moscow’s most likely response to a European request is easy to predict: either a refusal accompanied by demonstrative gloating or a demand for concessions over support for Ukraine. For Europe, the second option would amount to admitting that four years of energy independence were merely a temporary lease.
The January Test: Four Forecasts with Dates
I will take the liberty of making specific predictions that can later be checked.
First, by November 1, 2026, EU storage facilities will not reach the Commission’s recommended 80 percent. Final inventories will stand at 73 to 75 percent, and Brussels will quietly invoke the flexibility mechanism.
Second, if January 2027 is at least average in temperature and Hormuz does not fully reopen, the front-month TTF futures contract will close above €100 per megawatt-hour at least once before February 15, 2027.
Third, by April 1, 2027, European storage levels will fall below 25 percent, and during the summer Europe will buy gas at prices above €60 per megawatt-hour, making 2027 the second consecutive year of expensive energy.
Fourth, no EU country will reverse the ban on Russian LNG due to take effect on January 1 before the end of winter, but Hungary and Slovakia will use low inventories as an argument for delaying the pipeline gas ban until the latest legally permitted deadline at the end of October 2027.
I am prepared to be wrong on one of these points if the winter turns out to be as warm as 2023. But relying on that is precisely the kind of poor strategy the European commissioner has warned about.
Four years ago, Europe decided that its principal vulnerability had an address in Moscow and shut that address down with admirable determination. What it failed to notice was that energy security has no single address. It has only a margin of resilience, and that margin is either sufficient or it is not. In August, nine LNG carriers stood at the Ras Laffan terminals already loaded with Qatari gas, waiting for permission to pass through the strait. Liquefied gas in a tanker is constantly evaporating, losing roughly one-tenth of one percent of its cargo every day. While diplomats in New York bargain over the terms of a ceasefire, Europe’s winter is slowly evaporating into the sky above the Persian Gulf.