National Grid warns the UK's gas supplies are running low

As freezing weather continues to seize the UK today, National Grid has warned Britain does not have enough gas supplies to meet demand.

The UK's grid operator issued a gas deficit warning, saying the UK's gas supplies fell more than 50m cubic metres short of demand expected today.

National Grid was forecasting daily demand of 395.8m cubic metres, about 94m cubic metres above the average for this time of year.

"This warning has been issued in response to a series of significant supply losses resulting in a forecast end of day supply deficit," National Grid said.

According to Tom Marzec-Manser, the head of the European gas team at commodity price agency ICIS, the warning was issued following an outage at the South Hook liquid natural gas (LNG) terminal in Wales, where all 60m cubic metres per day of capacity came offline in an unplanned outage. This came on top of an ongoing outage in Norway.

Marzec-Manser has said while it was highly unlikely the UK would run out of gas, Europe was playing "tug-of-war" over its available gas supplies as countries across the continent grappled with much lower temperatures than usual on top of supply outages.

The supply issues have caused within-day wholesale UK gas prices, which yesterday hit a 12-year high, to jump to around 200p per therm, though they have now edged lower.

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