Why Are European Gas Prices Rising This Winter?

Last updated: 2026-11-03

European wholesale gas prices are rising this winter because the region enters the 2026/27 heating season with unusually low storage, a shrunken global LNG supply after Iranian strikes damaged Qatari export capacity, and structurally tighter competition with Asian buyers for the LNG cargoes that remain. The benchmark Dutch TTF front-month contract was trading around €72–74/MWh in the days around September 24, 2026, and EU gas storage stood at roughly 70% full — about 18 percentage points below the five-year seasonal average for the same date, according to Gas Infrastructure Europe’s AGSI+ tracker.

What Happened

Storage that would normally be nearing the EU’s traditional 90%-full target ahead of winter is instead sitting around 70% as of late September 2026. The European Commission relaxed the binding storage-fill target for the 2026 season from 90% to roughly 80% with a wider filling window, partly in recognition that summer prices were higher than winter forward prices — which removed the usual commercial incentive for utilities to inject gas into storage. Net injections since the start of the April 2026 refill season have exceeded 45 billion cubic meters, but that has covered only around two-thirds of the volume analysts say Europe needs before winter demand peaks.

What Moved the Market

Supply: Qatar’s LNG capacity is still impaired. Iranian strikes on Qatar’s Ras Laffan complex in March 2026 knocked out roughly 17% of the country’s LNG liquefaction capacity — enough that QatarEnergy has kept long-term contracts under force majeure for buyers including Italy’s Edison, with 21 cargoes (about 2.7 bcm) affected on that route alone between April and early September 2026. Qatar normally supplies around a fifth of global LNG, so a capacity hit of this size tightens the entire seaborne gas market, not just deliveries to Europe. See our related explainer on the Strait of Hormuz, through which about 93% of Qatar’s LNG exports normally transit. Update, September 29: QatarEnergy has rolled the force majeure notices over again, extending them to Pakistan and Bangladesh through end-November and to Edison in Italy into early December. Ship-tracking data cited by Reuters/ICIS shows Qatar loaded just 18 LNG cargoes over the past six months, versus 509 over the same period a year earlier – a roughly 96% drop – with Reuters estimating about $24 billion in lost sales. See Qatar Extends LNG Force Majeure Into December as Hormuz Blockage Persists. Update, November 3: The IEA’s Global Gas Security Review 2026 warned the global gas crunch could extend into 2027, saying LNG loadings from Qatar and the UAE fell by more than 60 billion cubic meters (bcm) between March and October 2026; higher output elsewhere covered only about two-thirds of that shortfall, leaving global LNG production down roughly 6% (20 bcm) year-on-year — the steepest annual decline the IEA has tracked. The agency said EU storage is at its lowest level for this point in the season in more than a decade, which “could substantially increase the need for injections” through summer 2027. See IEA Warns Global Gas Crunch Could Last Into 2027.

Demand: Europe is competing with Asia for the same cargoes. With global LNG supply growth limited until new Qatari and U.S. capacity ramps up (not expected before the second half of 2027), Europe has had to keep bidding TTF prices high enough to pull spot cargoes away from Asian buyers. This dynamic — rather than any single European event — is the main reason analysts cite for prices staying elevated into autumn 2026.

Inventories: the refill season fell short. Because summer 2026 prices were already elevated, utilities had less financial incentive to buy and inject gas than in a normal year, leaving the EU’s net storage build for the April–September injection season well behind the pace needed to reach even the relaxed 80% target.

Geopolitical developments: the Iran war remains unresolved. A U.S.–Iran ceasefire reached on April 8, 2026 collapsed with a further Memorandum of Understanding expiring in August 2026, and Gulf shipping and infrastructure have continued to see intermittent attacks into September, including a September 11 strike on Saudi Arabia’s East-West oil pipeline. This is a distinct risk factor from the Qatar LNG capacity loss, and it keeps a geopolitical risk premium embedded in both oil and gas prices, though it is not the sole or even primary driver of the storage shortfall itself.

Correlation is not causation: not every price tick this autumn traces to the Iran war. Cold-weather forecasts, unplanned outages at European or Norwegian gas infrastructure, and ordinary trading positioning ahead of winter also move TTF day to day. This section covers only the factors that exchange, EU regulatory and company-disclosure data can support.

How This Compares to Past Winters

Today’s roughly €72–74/MWh is far below the crisis peak of 2022 but well above the calmer years that followed it. TTF spiked to an all-time record near €342/MWh in August 2022 after Russia curtailed pipeline supply to Europe; prices then normalized as Europe rebuilt storage and diversified toward LNG, averaging around €41/MWh through 2023 and falling further to roughly €27/MWh in the first quarter of 2024. The 2026 winter price sits roughly two-and-a-half times that 2024 baseline — a reminder that “high” this year is a different order of magnitude from the 2022 shock, even though the underlying stress (a global LNG supply constraint colliding with tight European storage) is conceptually similar.

What Data Comes Next

• Weekly EU storage updates — Gas Infrastructure Europe’s AGSI+ platform publishes daily fill-level data by country; the trajectory into November will show whether the 80% relaxed target is reached.
• QatarEnergy force majeure notices — further extensions or liftings will signal whether Ras Laffan repairs are ahead of or behind the 3–5 year damage estimate reported after the March 2026 strikes.
• IEA and ACER winter outlook updates — ACER’s periodic “Key developments in European gas wholesale markets” reports track the storage-price relationship through the winter.
• Strait of Hormuz shipping data — IMF PortWatch daily transit counts remain the most current public indicator of how constrained regional oil and LNG loadings are.

Frequently Asked Questions

Why are European gas prices rising in 2026?
Primarily because EU storage entered autumn 2026 about 18 percentage points below its five-year average, while a 17% cut to Qatar’s LNG export capacity (from March 2026 Iranian strikes) and strong Asian demand have tightened the global LNG cargoes Europe depends on to fill the gap.

What is TTF gas?
The Title Transfer Facility (TTF) is the Dutch virtual trading hub whose front-month futures contract is the main reference price for wholesale natural gas across continental Europe.

Did the EU lower its gas storage target?
Yes. The EU’s original Gas Storage Regulation set a 90%-by-November target; for the 2026/27 winter, the Commission and member states used flexibilities in the regulation to move toward a lower, roughly 80% target with a wider filling window, citing high summer prices that discouraged injections.

Will European gas prices keep rising this winter?
Analysts differ. Some project prices could approach €90–100/MWh-equivalent if winter is colder than normal and Qatari supply stays constrained (a scenario, not a certainty); others note that a mild winter and steady Asian LNG demand could ease the market. The Daily Energy does not forecast prices — see the data sources above to track the actual trajectory.

Related The Daily Energy pages

• IEA Warns Global Gas Crunch Could Last Into 2027 (news)
• What Happens When the Strait of Hormuz Closes?
• European Gas Storage Falls 18 Points Below Average as Winter Approaches (news)
• Saudi Arabia Restarts East-West Pipeline as Yanbu Exports Set to Resume (news)
• What Is LNG and How Does It Work?
• What Is OPEC? Members, History and How It Sets Oil Policy

Sources

• Gas Infrastructure Europe (GIE), AGSI+ storage data, September 2026
• ICE / Investing.com, Dutch TTF Natural Gas Futures pricing, September 2026
• ACER, “Key developments in European gas wholesale markets (winter 2025-2026)”
• Reuters/TASS reporting on EU storage injections, September 2026
• Reuters, QatarEnergy force majeure extensions to Edison, July–September 2026
• IEA, Strait of Hormuz oil security brief
• IEA, Global Gas Security Review 2026, November 3, 2026
• The Daily Energy reporting, September 24, 2026

Illustrative image. Photo: BogTar201213, CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons — source