End of Day Natural Gas Summary: TTF up on Outage Extensions, Strikes

TTF front month traded higher on the day, just below Friday’s peak, amid ongoing industrial action at Australia’s LNG facilities and outage extensions to some of Norway’s fields and facilities, including the large Troll field.

• TTF OCT 23 up 6.1% at 36.61€/MWh
• TTF WIN 23 up 1.5% at 47.7€/MWh
• TTF SUM 24 up 1.5% at 50.45€/MWh
• JKM Oct 23 down -9.4% at 12.1$/mmbtu
• Chevron is applying to the Fair Work Commission for intractable bargaining declarations for the Gorgon and Wheatstone LNG facilities to help resolve the dispute with workers unions. The claims will be heard on Tuesday. Stoppages started last week of up to 11 hours per day until 13 Sep before increasing to 24-hour stoppages from 14 Sep.
• Norwegian pipeline supplies to Europe are at 145mcm/d today after extensions to key capacity reductions due to maintenance. The outage at the 125mcm/d Troll field has been extended by one day until 13 Sept.
• European natural gas storage was at 93.68% full on a 9 Sep according to GIE data compared to the five-year average for this time of year of 83.1% amid slow injection rates.
• Northwest Europe is set to finish the Winter 23/24 with natural gas storage inventories at 44% full, according to BNEF.
• Forecasts suggest higher wind output in central western Europe from next week, with wind output in France rising already from this weekend.
• LNG sendout to Europe has averaged around 330mcm/d in the week to 9 Sep with flows to NW Europe still just below last year levels.
• Exports of US LNG have become more profitable to Asia for the remainder of 2023, according to BNEF.
• Mainland China is set to account for more than 40% of LNG demand growth this winter. Global imports are forecast to increase by 8.9bcm according to BNEF.
• Russia’s Sakhalin-2 resumed LNG production after maintenance and is operating at full capacity according to Gazprom Deputy CEO Vitaly Markelov.