Trafigura Signs $1.5B Deal to Supply Germany’s SEFE With Gas

Trafigura has signed a new five-year contract to supply Germany’s state-owned gas importer SEFE with more than 150 TWh of natural gas, backed by a $1.5 billion loan partly guaranteed by the German government, the companies said on October 29. Annual volumes under the new deal rise to 30 TWh, up from roughly 23 TWh a year under the agreement it replaces, with first deliveries scheduled for November 1 — the day after the existing contract expires.

The loan is supported in part by a guarantee under Germany’s Untied Loan Guarantee (UFK) programme, administered through the German export credit agency Euler Hermes, which is designed to back long-term supply of strategic commodities to Germany. Trafigura said it will supply SEFE from its global gas portfolio, without specifying whether the gas will arrive as LNG or through pipelines. SEFE’s chief commercial officer, Frédéric Barnaud, said partnerships of this kind “strengthen our ability to source natural gas from a broad range of origins.”

A Bigger Renewal of a Crisis-Era Relationship

Trafigura and SEFE are not new partners. The trading house agreed an earlier, larger credit line with SEFE in 2022 — a $3 billion, four-year loan agreement — at a moment when SEFE, formerly Gazprom Germania, had just been nationalised by Berlin after losing its Russian parent and its Russian pipeline gas in the same year. That 2022 deal was as much about keeping SEFE solvent and supplied through an emergency as it was a conventional commercial contract. The new agreement, smaller in loan size but larger in annual gas volume, suggests SEFE’s financing needs have normalised even as its appetite for long-term, diversified gas supply has grown.

Timed to Germany’s Winter Storage Push

The renewal lands as Germany works to rebuild gas inventories before the heating season. As of October 28, German storage sites were just below 62% full — comfortably below the roughly 75% level across the European Union as a whole, according to data from Gas Infrastructure Europe. Germany operates the EU’s fourth-largest gas storage capacity, so a shortfall there weighs disproportionately on the bloc’s winter security margin, giving Berlin a direct interest in SEFE locking in supply beyond what the spot market might offer on short notice.

One Piece of Germany’s Post-Pipeline Supply Mix

SEFE has spent the past three years rebuilding Germany’s gas supply chain almost from scratch after the loss of Russian pipeline volumes that once covered more than half the country’s gas needs. That rebuild has run on two tracks: termed contracts with specific LNG projects, such as SEFE’s binding 20-year supply agreement with Canada’s Ksi Lisims LNG project, and portfolio deals with trading houses like Trafigura that can draw on cargoes and pipeline gas from multiple origins rather than a single liquefaction plant. The Trafigura contract falls into the second category, giving SEFE flexibility that a single-source deal cannot, in exchange for financing costs that a less creditworthy buyer would struggle to secure without a government guarantee behind it. Germany’s broader import picture, covering US, Qatari and Norwegian supply alongside portfolio contracts like this one, is laid out in more detail in The Daily Energy’s tracker of where Germany gets its LNG.

Why the Size of the Loan Still Matters

The German guarantee behind the loan is itself a policy signal: Berlin is still willing to use its sovereign credit to make sure large, systemically important gas contracts for SEFE get financed on favourable terms, three years after the state took the company over to prevent a supply collapse. For Trafigura, locking in a guaranteed German counterparty for 150 TWh of throughput over five years provides a predictable, government-backed revenue stream at a time when European gas trading margins have narrowed as the market has normalised from the extreme volatility of 2022. Neither company disclosed pricing terms for the gas itself, leaving the loan size and volume figures as the clearest public measure of how much this contract is worth to each side.

Sources

• Trafigura, “Trafigura signs USD1.5 billion loan agreement guaranteed by the Federal Republic of Germany to secure gas supply,” October 29, 2026 — official press release with loan terms and volume figures.
• Oilprice.com, “Trafigura Signs New Gas Supply Deal with German SEFE,” October 29, 2026 — independent reporting with storage-level context.
• LNG Prime, “SEFE, Trafigura seal five-year gas supply deal,” October 29, 2026 — independent confirmation of contract terms.
• NaturalGasWorld, “Trafigura enters $3 bln loan to supply Germany’s Sefe with gas,” October 29, 2026 — independent reporting, including comparison with the 2022 agreement.

Illustrative image. Photo: Arne Müseler, CC BY-SA 3.0 de, via Wikimedia Commons — source