Mid-Day Gas Summary: TTF Regains Ground

Front month TTF regained some ground throughout the morning driven by new Houthi revel attacks on vessels in the Red Sea and curtailed pipeline supplies from Norway. High storage levels and muted demand are limiting gains.

• TTF MAR 24 up 1.7% at 28.83€/MWh
• TTF SUM 24 up 1.5% at 29.35€/MWh
• Yemen’s Houthi rebels claimed two separate vessel attacks Tuesday as they targeted US and British vessels. One of the attacks has been confirmed by security firm Ambrey.
• TTF second month implied volatility has fallen to the lowest since Jul 2021 after falling from just below 100% at the start of the year to 68.02% yesterday according to Bloomberg based on ICE data.
• Nominations for Norwegian pipeline supplies to Europe are still curtailed at 302.7mcm/d due to an unplanned outages at the Troll field until 7 Feb due to a compressor failure and an outage at the Nyhamna processing plant after a power supply failure.
• Temperatures in NW and central Europe are still forecast to remain above normal this week but drift back to near normal of just below from around Feb 12.
• Net withdrawal rates remain below normal with European natural gas storage at 68.92% full on Feb 4 according to GIE data compared to the seasonal five year average of 55.28%.
• European LNG sendout was relatively unchanged on the day at 318mcm/d on Feb 4 and still low compared to Jan levels and flows seen in 2022 and 2023.
• The total estimated quantity of LNG on tankers that has not unloaded for at least 20 days decreased by 2% last week to 2.86mn tons as of 4 February, according to Bloomberg estimates.
• Global weekly LNG imports increased by 2% to 8.5mn tons during 29 January and 5 February amid higher shipments into Japan and South Korea according to BNEF.
• PipeChina will put the Zhangzhou LNG terminal, located in Zhangzhou city in Fujian province, into use in H1 2024, according to OilChem.