Snapshot - 22 October 2026
Gas prices resumed their climb on Wednesday after a one-day pause, driven by a fresh loss of Norwegian supply rather than by weather. An unplanned outage at the Troll field cut capacity through to the weekend and dragged total Norwegian nominations to their lowest level in more than a fortnight, while near-term temperatures were running a couple of degrees below normal. UK day-ahead gas settled in the mid-210s in pence per therm and the forward curve rose across every contract, with front-season summer and winter prices both adding six to seven pence. Tuesday’s modest correction, which had briefly interrupted a long run of gains, was wiped out inside a single session. Flows have weakened further this morning as annual Norwegian maintenance gets under way, and prices have opened firmer again.
Power moved in two directions at once. The forward curve followed gas higher, with winter-delivery contracts adding four to six pounds per megawatt hour, but day-ahead baseload fell sharply - by more than twenty pounds - as wind generation jumped to over 40 per cent of the stack and pushed gas-fired plant out of the mix. That left generation margins for gas plant squeezed to around breakeven on the prompt, with only peak hours covering fuel and carbon costs. Intraday prices swung from the low forties to the mid-260s across the day, and dipped to zero in the early hours of Thursday morning as wind built overnight. More wind and warmer weather are expected into next week, which should keep the prompt soft even as the curve stays supported.
Elsewhere, crude held close to five-month highs without moving much on the day, caught between a worsening security picture in the Gulf and regional export volumes that continue to run above pre-conflict levels. Coal was flat. Carbon firmed slightly in both the UK and EU schemes, with the UK allowance gaining a little more ground and narrowing its discount to the European contract. European storage remains behind where it stood a year ago, though the gap has closed considerably since late summer, and the mix across countries is uneven. Sterling was marginally stronger against both the dollar and the euro, offering a small offset to import costs.
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