Crude · Issue No. 23 · 19 October 2026

Europe's Gas Hit Its 2026 High and Kept It

This week: Gas at its 2026 high · Hormuz traffic count · Saudi crude returns

Lead Story

Europe's Gas Hit Its 2026 High and Kept It

A Norwegian outage, a Qatari shortfall and a war at sea arrived in the same week, and the price has not said which one it is paying for.

Europe's gas price closed on Friday at its highest level this year.

The Dutch TTF contract, the wholesale price most European gas is traded against, settled at 87.547 euros a megawatt hour for November delivery on 16 October 2026. Crude last printed it at 72.07 on 25 September 2026, when the nearest contract was for October delivery, so in three weeks the price of Europe's marginal gas, the last cargoes it has to buy, has risen by about a fifth.

Storage is where that rise bites. EU gas storage stood at 74.2 percent full on 15 October 2026, the lowest for that date since records began in 2011, just as the heating season starts to draw gas out of the tanks rather than put it in. Oil rose too, and Brent crude for December delivery closed on Friday at its highest level since 19 May 2026.

So the question for anyone who heats a home with gas this winter is what the market was paying for. Three things hit Europe's gas in one week, and which of them it was decides whether the price comes back down.

The obvious reading is that gas caught the Gulf's fever. Attacks on ships near Hormuz reached a wartime high, and Qatar's liquefied gas has to sail through those same waters. But the two prices did not move on the same days. On Tuesday gas rose more than three percent while Brent fell, and on Friday, the day Brent made most of its weekly gain, gas rose about a third as much in percentage terms. Whatever lifted gas, it was not the daily news that lifted oil.

Thin storage is the next suspect, and it explains less than it seems. A tank level changes slowly and storage has been filling all month, so it cannot by itself account for a rise packed into two days. In October 2023, with storage almost full, Europe's gas price still jumped by more than a third in a week, which shows that a full tank does not make a price calm.

That leaves two events that both landed on Monday 12 October 2026. Gassco, the operator of Norway's gas pipelines, notified a one day outage at the Kårstø plant, which processes gas from Norway's offshore fields, and almost all of the week's rise came on that Monday and the Tuesday after. On the same day a Reuters column carried a forecast from the ship tracking firm Kpler that Qatar's liquefied gas exports could fall to 0.6 million tonnes in October from 1.6 million in September. QatarEnergy, the state producer, has extended force majeure, the legal notice that it cannot deliver, to buyers in Asia until the end of November and to Italy's Edison until early December.

The week cannot separate the two, but they are different kinds of risk. Norway's outage lasted a day, Tuesday's rise came after it had ended, and gas held that level to Friday. Qatar's shortfall is the Gulf war reaching Europe's gas through missing cargoes rather than daily headlines, and it runs into winter. That points towards Qatar without proving it.

For a household the stakes are easy to size. The week's rise from 81.434 to 87.547 euros a megawatt hour, 6.113 euros, works out at 0.6113 euro cents a kilowatt hour. A home burning 10,000 kilowatt hours of gas a year therefore pays about 61 euros more over a year if that weekly rise holds and a variable tariff passes it on, before tax.

Only two prints together can answer it. If Qatar's missing cargoes are what hold the price up, gas should stay high for as long as they stay missing. The call: if the first Kpler figure Reuters reports by 15 December 2026 for Qatar's November exports is below one million tonnes, the Dutch gas price for December delivery settles above 85 euros a megawatt hour on 26 November 2026. That level sits above where gas stood before Norway's outage, so a price that has simply given back Norway's outage should not clear it. A settlement at or below it with Qatar's cargoes still missing makes the call wrong, and a November recovery in Qatar's exports voids it.

Geopolitics

Two Counts of the Same Strait

Tehran declared Hormuz closed again on Saturday, a day after the US military said it was in charge of it.

The shipping data firm Kpler counted 131 crossings of the Strait of Hormuz in the week to 14 October 2026, down from 176 the week before. In the week to 11 October 2026 the UK Maritime Trade Operations centre, the Royal Navy office that logs attacks on merchant ships, recorded twelve vessels attacked, the most in any week of the war. The container ship GFS Pride was hit on 13 October 2026 and later sank. Singapore's maritime authority said it had been hit by projectiles, while Iran's Revolutionary Guards, the force that runs Tehran's naval war in the Gulf, say it struck a mine.

On Friday Central Command, the US military's regional headquarters, said about 400 merchant ships had crossed in the previous seven days. It added that the strait "is controlled by the United States and our regional partners, not Iran." On Saturday Iran's Revolutionary Guards declared it closed again. Both statements come from parties to the war, and the counts measure different things. Most of the crossings in the Royal Navy centre's own weekly tally were reported by the US military rather than seen on ship tracking, so the military's figure cannot be checked against what independent trackers see.

The trackers' counts can be checked outside the war, and the military's cannot. A strait that both sides claim to control is, for the insurer pricing a tanker's passage, a strait that neither controls. In practice that means the crude and gas Europe is waiting for arrive at the pace ship trackers can see, which this week was slower.

In Focus: Saudi Supply

Riyadh Gave Europe Its Barrels Back and Charged More for Them

Saudi crude returns in full to Europe's refiners, at a price raised for them and cut for Asia.

Saudi Aramco, the kingdom's state oil company, will supply European refiners all the crude they asked for in November, Bloomberg reported on 9 October 2026, citing at least three of them.

The price moved the other way. Aramco's official selling prices for November, the prices it sets for its own crude each month against a regional benchmark, rose by three dollars a barrel for crude sold to northwest Europe and were cut by three dollars for Asia. Gulf crude is flowing again, and the International Energy Agency put Gulf crude exports at more than three quarters of their prewar level in September.

So the lesson is that Riyadh has moved from rationing Europe by volume to rationing it by price. Asia gets the discount, while Europe gets the barrels at a higher price against its own benchmark. For a European refinery that means a full allocation is less of a relief than it looks, because each Saudi barrel now costs more relative to Brent than it did a month ago. That cost ends up in the diesel and heating oil it sells.

Take Action

If you pay a European energy bill

1. Ask your gas supplier this week whether your tariff is fixed or follows the wholesale price. Every 10 euros a megawatt hour on the wholesale price is one euro cent a kilowatt hour, about 100 euros a year for a home burning 10,000 kilowatt hours.
2. Price any heating oil delivery against your own country's line in the Commission's weekly bulletin, which includes taxes, before you accept it. The EU average there was 1,732.43 euros per 1,000 litres on 12 October 2026, and on a 2,000 litre delivery every 10 euro cents a litre above your country's figure costs you 200 euros.

If you follow the market

3. Compare gas with Brent on the next day the Gulf dominates the news. If gas rises with oil that day, the Gulf is in Europe's gas price after all.
4. Pair the gas price with Qatar's November export count when it is reported. A recovery in Qatar's cargoes with gas still near its high would mean something else is holding the price up.
5. Follow QatarEnergy's force majeure on its European contracts. A notice lifting it before the end of November is the cleanest test of how much of Europe's gas price is Qatar.