Europe now has so much natural gas that prices just dipped below zero

https://lite.cnn.com/en/article/h_84f44a3d4dc64a2e2686175e76059fd3

by rntn • 4 years ago

252 187 4 years ago

lite.cnn.com

the_optimist• 4 years ago

Rather, so few places to store natural gas for ordinary use. Don’t trust journalists to be not dumb.

dr_dshiv• 4 years ago

I had to pay 800 euros last month for home energy on my variable contract in Amsterdam. Insane.

bpodgursky• 4 years ago

Well, if you have a refrigerated pressure tank which can store a few tens of thousands of cubic yards of LNG, you are in luck.

ralphmelish5• 4 years ago

What are the kWh prices in Amsterdam? I'm in London and would need to consume more than 1,700 kw to pay that much (£0.3866 per kWh, £0.3849 standing charge).

Edit: I'm also on a variable contract

iso16312• 4 years ago

How variable -- how many times a day does your price per kwh change?

Dma54rhs2• 4 years ago

I'm not from Holland but in EU and I pay hourly market rate of my regions electricity pool.

aspyct• 4 years ago

Sorry what? The price of gas has multiplied by 15 here...

jefftk3• 4 years ago

Normally you run storage facilities neither all the way full nor all the way empty: you want to be able to smooth out fluctuations in supply and demand. Because of the war Europe is running gas storage near its upper limit, which means we should expect less flexibility and more price volatility: they won't want to draw them way down if we get a serious cold snap, and they have nowhere to put extra gas if it's warmer than usual. The latter happened, there's nowhere to put incoming gas, so spot prices fell below zero.

visviva• 4 years ago

Great, succinct explanation - thanks.

sorokod4• 4 years ago

you want to be able to smooth out fluctuations in supply and demand.

Can you say a bit more about the "you" mentioned?

I can imagine "you"s who care only about having heating during wintertime.

antasvara• 4 years ago

From context, it seems that the "you" in question is "a company that runs a natural gas storage space." As a company with fiduciary responsibilities, they likely can't concern themselves too much with the problem you mention.

jefftk3• 4 years ago

The standard "smooth out the fluctuations" approach gives an extremely low probability of running out of fuel during the winter at a reasonable cost, but only assuming sufficient fuel imports. Because of the loss of Russian gas and not having sufficient LNG infrastructure to make up it, Europe will burn gas faster than replacement when it's sufficiently cold, and if the cold weather lasts long enough they could run out of gas. So they're now using a more expensive and wasteful strategy of keeping storage closer to full, exactly to reduce the risk of people not having heating during winter.

Dylan168073• 4 years ago

One of the important factors in ensuring heating is keeping the movement of gas from being too unpredictable. One of the important factors in keeping it affordable is having a stable supply.

danielmarkbruce• 4 years ago

This is a good question, I don't understand the downvotes or the responses (1 exception). Gas is delivered to customers via a whole system of players, each who have different motivations and incentives. How you arrive at the current state of "more gas in storage than otherwise" is, at least on the surface, an interesting question when one considers that complexity.

speedylight• 4 years ago

Are you saying that by holding onto so much gas that there’s less in active circulation therefore it leads price increases?

jacobolus• 4 years ago

He is saying having less available slack increases volatility:

It led to a recent price drop because when gas usage was lower than expected there was nowhere to store the excess supply as would usually be done.

It will lead to a price rise if usage is higher than expected because they won’t want to risk depleting stores too much.

i_am_proteus• 4 years ago

Yes, and: natural gas is a byproduct of oil production. For decades, natural gas was flared off as an unwanted byproduct. It is still flared off today when it's uneconomical to capture it.

Unlike other goods where supply will drop if there is insufficient demand, a lot of natural gas gets produced regardless due to oil production. It gets sent to market because there is no local storage capacity and the alternative would be to flare it off.

Shenanigans in the futures market aside, this contributes to (temporary) oversupply driving prices negative.

The same warehousing phenomena result in this negative price probably not lasting very long. Barring an extremely warm next few weeks, expect the price to be back up soon.

ShivShankaran• 4 years ago

another big reason is the difference in pricing between pipe and shipping. With pipe it's instant while with ship the spot pricing is before the ship start it's journey from the filling port. Added to the complexity that in EU all the ships with natural gas are stuck at ports because unloading capacity has not been upgraded.

Combining both has reduced the spot prices so that more gas is not sent. It does not reflect the real demand which we are going to have in few months or the volatility.

if you like volatility, natural gas is the best product. One contract is around $60k and could net you thousands in minutes if you play it right.

freefaler• 4 years ago

Some important caveats - the storage squeeze is only in Spain - storage facilities are pre-booked, meaning the if you want to buy some gas you should've booked the some storage beforehand. Storage supply is a non-elastic on the shore.

kgwgk3• 4 years ago

Dutch gas spot prices for delivery within an hour going negative may be telling us something about the spare storage capacity connected to that network though.

Stranger43• 4 years ago

The problem is as for most of the current "Supply Chain Crisis" that the core of the problem is with logistics and distribution not raw supply, i.e. it doesn't really matter how many Liqid Gas carriers that show up of the coast of Europe as there is nowhere to unload it as the networks are designed around just in time supplies of gas flowing out of the pipelines from Russia.

This distribution problem is what is sending the price of everything sky rocketing and for anything other then microchips from the overstretched TSMC fabs the real cause of the price hikes is a breakdown in the fragile "just in time" logistics network, dependent on a few choke point running at 101% efficiency all of the time.

c7b• 4 years ago

Natural gas prices just dipped below zero.
Those ships [are] carrying about $2 billion worth of LNG.

Really?

sudhirj• 4 years ago

The local spot prices dropped below zero. The price of gold might be 1000 currency units an ounce, but if my house is about to collapse under the weight of all my gold I might pay you a little to take it off my hands - dropping the price below zero for the people in my immediate vicinity.

laverya• 4 years ago

Depends on where those ships can offload the LNG. If they were in Asia or the US Northeast, prices would not be negative. (But prices differ by significant multiples between those locations)

FerociousTimes5• 4 years ago

The $2 Bln quote could be historical but in real time live spot prices at the present, the rates cratered momentarily to zero or even negative territories.

hef198983• 4 years ago

Luckily, LNG ships can simply be parked at sea until prices rise again, same for oil tankers. Pipelines going into almost full storage don't have that luxury.

somedude895• 4 years ago

Spot prices can be very volatile and easily drop below zero. If your stores are full and you have nowhere to put gas that might be building up inside an incoming pipeline, you'll be happy to give it away for free. But once it gets cold and people start using more gas, you might pay those $2B for the gas in the tankers off your coast to satisfy increased demand.

mensetmanusman• 4 years ago

This is a better situation than the reverse. It’s fortunate the winter has been mild so far. Will be interesting if the LNG industry can keep pace and replace Russia for good.

FerociousTimes5• 4 years ago

Not to nitpick and assuming you're living in the northern hemisphere, winter has not officially arrived; we're still in the fall/autumn season.

ndlzk2• 4 years ago

In fact It’s unseasonably hot currently. Nobody is using heaters at all I suspect.

matai_kolila5• 4 years ago

It's a little too nitpicky IMO to point this out (not to say you were trying to be though, all good), because what people are shorthanding here is that it's "unseasonably warm" still, and that's a good thing.

"Winter so far has been mild" is not a confusion on their part that it won't get any colder, just a misstatement. Autumn has been unseasonably warm, and the difference in parts of Europe between the two isn't as severe as here in the US.

Silverback_VII• 4 years ago

LNG industry can keep pace and replace Russia for good.

Nobody can replace Russia and their resources in the long-term.

Ancapistani• 4 years ago

“long term” is doing a lot of work in that sentence.

It seems clear that what we’re doing right now can sustain things until spring. If we’re willing to pay to do it again next year, and the year after that… at some point it’s going to be financially viable to change the makeup of both energy sources and how it’s consumed.

colechristensen2• 4 years ago

North American petroleum and developing solar and nuclear resources probably can.

kryptiskt• 4 years ago

Nobody should replace Russia in the long term as fossil fuels should go away completely.

jandrese3• 4 years ago

Russia is being replaced by solar, wind, hydro, geothermal, and nuclear power in the long term. Being a fossil fuel exporter is not a sustainable business model in the 21st century.

Schroedingersat• 4 years ago

The thermal power available from all Russian gas is about 5 years of chinese PV module production or 10 years of world wind additions at the current (rapidly increasing) rate. We can tighten the belt by 15% while building out enough capacity to replace it entirely.

Once cheap hydrolysers scale production, a huge chunk of the market will start to disappear due to ammonia production switching over.

KingOfCoders4• 4 years ago

It can for Europe, prices will be higher than with Russian gas, and production cost will rise.

But the main impact will be to poorer countries which until now might have been depending on LNG while "rich" Europe is buying up everything.

reportgunner• 4 years ago

4 seasons in 12 months = 3 months per season. March is not winter, it's the start of spring.

March, April, May = Spring

June, July, August = Summer

September, October, November = Autumn/Fall

December, January, February = Winter

No Winter has started this year yet, we have one more month of Autumn/Fall.

Denvercoder96• 4 years ago

March is not winter, it's the start of spring.

That depends on which definition you're using. The astronomical winter runs until 21 March (and doesn't start until 22 December). Seasons in general are just a somewhat ill-defined concept, as weather doesn't particularly care about human constructs.

goodpoint• 4 years ago

Any link to the price charts?

csours2• 4 years ago

You have different markets essentially - there is a market for delivery, and a futures market.

The market for delivery briefly went price negative. This is dominated by what is in the pipeline right now and what volume of gas is being pulled from the pipeline right now.

The futures market is still positive. This market is served by LNG and gas that is still in the ground. The price here is dominated by risks.

---

The above model is oversimplified and wrong. If you want to know how things work, it may take some dedicated study beyond internet comments.

cj• 4 years ago

The above model is oversimplified and wrong.

Can you share anything that would help us commoners reading internet comments understand why the analysis is wrong?

csours2• 4 years ago

There are more than 2 markets. The dominating factors change based on market conditions.

chinchilla2020• 4 years ago

I try to explain this to people all the time with respect to gasoline prices in the US.

People thing it has to do with the 'oil companies', but crude producers are hedged into next decade for the most part. Even on the refinery side they are locked in long term contracts with distributors for their products, of which gasoline is a very small piece of the pie.

boilerupnc• 4 years ago

I listened to a Planet Money podcast [0] last month that was really interesting and helpful (for me at least) to understand the aggregate price breakdown and the different aspects which contribute to the sum (e.g. transport, refinement, drilling, taxes, etc ...) price for a unit of gasoline.

In particular, one portion talks about how tankers aren't beholden to the original manifest when they leave port A to go to port B. Mid voyage, they can suddenly pivot to port C if the spot buying price there is better than port B. And so on and so forth. So, until the tanker reaches a particular port - the market is what dictates which ports the tankers end up gravitating towards dynamically (and probably factoring in current and future weather, spot buying price fluctuations, current proximity, piracy, etc.) Really fascinating stuff and was eye opening for me to realize how truly small the transport cost portion is for the cost of a unit of gasoline.

"Planet Money investigates how exactly gas stations determine how much a gallon is going to cost us, and why those numbers are so volatile."

[0] https://www.npr.org/2022/09/15/1123108797/planet-money-break...

atty• 4 years ago

I am an American and not knowledgeable about how energy pricing works, so I am curious, how do we square this with the rates that Europeans have been paying for energy and natural gas lately? Are utilities making off like bandits? Or were they running very low over the last few months and suddenly got a huge influx?

KingOfCoders4• 4 years ago

Well lately the price is <100EUR/MWh, peak this year was >350EUR/MWh

guerrilla2• 4 years ago

Yes, on the one hand there are some sticky prices and higher profit margins (which is talked about) but also increased volatility in general. Beyond that, I wish I understood it better.

colechristensen2• 4 years ago

Very short term and local supply and demand issue where there was way more supply than demand. A market inefficiency issue with Europe finding new sources for natural gas supply and being paranoid about running out.

They’re trying to cut off Russian supply and being threatened of being cut off. Russian supply is being replaced with American gas. But this is new, it was warm, there was too much gas in places. It happens. It’s good news really.

Denvercoder96• 4 years ago

how do we square this with the rates that Europeans have been paying for energy and natural gas lately?

Different markets. The price that went negative was for immediate delivery of gas (spot market), while utilities buy their energy way before it's actually delivered (futures market). The price on the spot market went briefly negative because it's unseasonably warm in Europe right now (so less gas usage for heating), and all the storage is nearly full. The price on the futures market is still high, because once it gets cold demand will pick way up and outpace supply.

An interesting sidenote is that storage being full significantly increases volatility in the market: in the usual situation, a storage facility would buy up all the surplus gas on the spot market at a cheap but probably non-negative price, store it, and sell it on the futures market for a higher price. This stabilizes the market, and creates some constraints on market prices. Now that storage is full, they can't do that, and prices can fluctuate much more.

sandos• 4 years ago

Spot electricity prices have been low in Scandinavia, too, so the markets are, at least weakly, linked.

dr_faustus2• 4 years ago

I really don't understand the doom and gloom wrt next year. What was obviously completely underestimated was the elasticity of consumer demand for gas. In Germany, consumers are using 25% less gas even if you account for the weather.

So with increased supply from Netherlands and Norway, even a limited amount of LNG will probably be enough to fill the storage again and compensate the missing Russian gas (which accounted for about 40% of the German gas supply.

We, too, have not switched on the gas based heating yet. Instead, we are using a mix of wood and infrared electrical heaters to keep the rooms at a bearable (albeit not overly comfortable) 19 degrees celsius.

behringer2• 4 years ago

I imagine you'd be using gas if you were paid to use it. Sadly market prices in the consumers favor seems to rarely make it to actual consumers.

Denvercoder96• 4 years ago

At least in the Netherlands you can get a energy contract with dynamic pricing, where you pay the actual market price (plus tax) at time of use. When energy prices go negative, you'll also get paid.

However, this is a knife that cuts both ways: if the energy market prices rise sharply, you'll also immediately have to pay higher prices and don't benefit from the contracting ahead-of-time and averaging that regular energy companies do. I've spoken to people with such a contract whose energy bills went up by >100x this year, compared to last year.

aschearer• 4 years ago

The doom and gloom makes more sense when considering who benefits from pushing that narrative.

landoftheice• 4 years ago

If by consumer you mean only residential households then yes I agree. But if you enjoy consuming the products of or enjoy the benefits from the many wonders of German industry and manufacturing then underestimate no more.

arbuge• 4 years ago

We, too, have not switched on the gas based heating yet. Instead, we are using a mix of wood and infrared electrical heaters

In the event that your electric power is derived from gas, you've shifted the burden elsewhere and actually increased overall gas consumption, since using gas to warm your home directly would be more efficient.

xapata• 4 years ago

Not if the electric heaters aren't producing the same amount of heat. The comment suggested they've reduced heat consumption.

asdajksah21232• 4 years ago

What was obviously completely underestimated was the elasticity of consumer demand for gas

I don't think it was evident that individuals and businesses would be willing to make some of these changes they have. For example, German companies are planning on shutting down factories for the winter. Cities are planning on ending night lighting.

In addition, winter so far has been fairly warm. It may still turn cold, so Europe isn't out of the woods yet.

Finally, the increase in the LNG supply was achieved incredibly fast. If someone had predicted Europe would have the LNG supply they do today at the beginning of the war they would have been dismissed as a utopist.

michpoch• 4 years ago

In addition, winter so far has been fairly warm.

It's Autumn. Winter starts on the 21st Dec.

October in most of the Europe is not that much of a heating season, November will make us start digging into the gas we prepared. It's way too early for early to judge how easy it'll be.

vagrantJin• 4 years ago

If someone had predicted Europe would have the LNG supply they do today at the beginning of the war they would have been dismissed as a utopist.

Not really. It was always a matter of cost. Losing 30% of gas supply is no laughing matter - and the shock will naturally push governments to willingness to pay above premium prices to stabilize supply.

jl6• 4 years ago

I think you’re basically right, but just noting that winter hasn’t started yet and climate change has blessed Europe with an unseasonably warm October.

throwaway4aday• 4 years ago

a bearable (albeit not overly comfortable) 19 degrees celsius

Interesting to see what temp other people keep their homes at. Our normal indoor temp is 19 and I sometimes find that too warm.

kube-system2• 4 years ago

I like mine at 23-24 in the winter, although the 'default' in the US is usually 20-22

dom96• 4 years ago

Temperature isn't the full story, what you really want is the combination of temperature and humidity, i.e. the heat index.

thaumasiotes3• 4 years ago

I would generally want 21 or 22.

qeomash2• 4 years ago

then why are we still paying so much for it?

remus2• 4 years ago

I think the article is misleading. The spot price is about supply and demand over an extremely short time period and has dipped below zero because at the moment gas storage in europe is very full, so if you've got a load of natural gas to sell no one is buying because there's nowhere to put it. This is probably related to unseasonably warm temperatures in Europe at the moment, so people are using less gas than expected to heat their homes.

The high prices you pay as a homeowner are to do with high expected demand over to winter relative to the available supply, because the supply has been seriously reduced due to the war in Ukraine.

em500• 4 years ago

Because most Europeans do not need all that gas today or tomorrow, and storage costs money.

qeomash2• 4 years ago

Can anyone ELI5 on to why are we paying so much for it then?

remus2• 4 years ago

Copying my answer from another comment:

The spot price is about supply and demand over an extremely short time period and has dipped below zero because at the moment gas storage in europe is very full, so if you've got a load of natural gas to sell no one is buying because there's nowhere to put it. This is probably related to unseasonably warm temperatures in Europe at the moment, so people are using less gas than expected to heat their homes.

The high prices you pay as a homeowner are to do with high expected demand over to winter relative to the available supply, because the supply has been seriously reduced due to the war in Ukraine.

hef198983• 4 years ago

Also, gas providers filled up storage and secured volumes at high prices. Even if they now buy for way less, customer prices will be an average (at least, depending on exactly how providers calculate costs and thus prices) of those two. So until the old inventory is consumed, consumer gas prices won't move a lot.

Overall, this is good. As a consumer you want stable prices and not depend on spot and future markets fluctuations.

matai_kolila5• 4 years ago

Can I take a stab?

If I just so happen to have decent storage capacity for this gas I could make a killing, except if I did have that storage, I would have already had long term contracts to fill that storage/keep it full given the uncertainty in Ukraine so there's not really any place for this gas to go, but they're still producing the gas and it's hard to just stop doing that so for a little bit the gas companies were willing to pay people to get this gas off their hands to make room for the new gas they were pumping out.

Right?

anm892• 4 years ago

Different countries have very different storage capacities. Some nations have most of their years demand in storage capacity whereas others like the UK have only a few days and require a constant flow.

If you are one of the countries that can store a whole year this is great news. If you're Britain, you could still be out of gas and paying exorbitant prices a week from now

msie• 4 years ago

Heh, how's Brexit working out for them? BTW has Nigel Farage paid for his lies?

lowercased• 4 years ago

Not to dismiss this entirely, but I can't recall political leaders at that level ever 'paying' for lies or misinformation in any capacity commensurate with the negative impact of the lies. Has his reputation been dinged a bit in some quarters? Perhaps. That'll be the extent of it.

anm892• 4 years ago

This really isn't a brexit story

tuukkah5• 4 years ago

It's the same with electricity markets: at times there's so much wind and nuclear power that the spot price goes below zero in Europe as well as in the US: https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S266679242...

I still pay around 5 cents/kWh to the middlemen though so consumption hasn't been profitable to me so far.

leobg4• 4 years ago

Where are you based if you are paying five cents? Here in Germany, I pay 10 times that much.

legulere• 4 years ago

The cost for the electricity net was around 7.5 cents in Germany last year: https://www.bmwk.de/Redaktion/DE/Artikel/Energie/strompreise...

loufe• 4 years ago

I paid only slightly more than that in Québec, Canada. The province is blessed with a superabundance of hydroelectric potential and thankfully the infrastructure is in well-managed government hands.

tuukkah5• 4 years ago

In Helsinki, Finland, we pay 4 cents/kWh to the local grid company. Then on top of that, everyone has a contract with an electricity supplier of their choosing, and mine charges 0.9 ¢/kWh on top of the hourly spot price. (My previous supplier charged a fixed price and went bankrupt due to the current crisis.)

The spot price in Finland is somewhat linked to the prices of the neighbouring Sweden, Norway and Estonia. Recently, it has varied with -0.1 and 93 ¢/kWh as the extremes and the average around 15 ¢/kWh (night-time lows included).

thaumasiotes3• 4 years ago

at times there's so much wind and nuclear power

Isn't the amount of nuclear power constant?

tuukkah5• 4 years ago

Yes and no: yes in the sense that they can't quickly power down when wind would suffice, no in the sense that they suffer both regular and unplanned shutdowns with an average load factor of 80%.

ajross2• 4 years ago

Yes, but demand isn't. And nuclear can't be trivially shut down, the reactor stays hot for quite a while and that energy needs to go somewhere (which is the whole point of the iconic giant cooling towers these plants have). So if demand drops rapidly and your reactors are going full tilt, the price of electricity goes to zero.

Ekaros• 4 years ago

Spot prices are just that spot prices. Just like oil prices dropped below zero for short period during shutdown. Now this happened with gas. Doesn't necessarily tell too much for next months.

Denvercoder96• 4 years ago

The oil prices that went negative were actually futures, not spot prices.

ck2• 4 years ago

They need to perfect the capture and storage technology and force all the Bakken oil field flares to use it.

Billion of cubic feet every DAY just burnt off into the atmosphere because the oil makes them more money. Over $100 Million per MONTH

Our country/world is insane with waste while people freeze and starve.

PM_me_your_math• 4 years ago

Why can't things just be free? Free stuff for everyone everywhere! Yeah! I'd vote for anybody offering me free stuff, even if it came with strings that I wasn't aware of until it was too late. If only Hugo Chavez were alive today. He'd know what to do. Sadly, the only playbook all our leaders have to go on are his books.

anthk• 4 years ago

Also, the climate helps.

We have 25C in Bilbao. >30C expected at the weekend.

We usually get UK weather on Fall, and it didn't rain in weeks...

No chilly-windy Winters, but the "alternative" we are living on looks far worse.

rybosworld• 4 years ago

This is not entirely related to the article:

Rising temperatures should reduce demand for fossil fuels as a heating source (I think). Does anyone know if this is already factored into global warming predictions?

guerrilla2• 4 years ago

I don't know but just so you know, it can also make it a lot worse by cutting off the gulf stream which is how we're not spending even more energy in (especially northern) Europe.

bluGill3• 4 years ago

It will also raise demand for whatever runs air conditioners. This is all factored in.

What isn't factored in (guesses are, but we have no idea to know what guesses are right) is how much will we become more efficient, or how fast we will switch to renewables. This year heat pumps were very popular to install in Europe this summer, and they are more efficient, so all models need to be updated. Predictions that are more than a few years out are all being updated for expected growth in EVs, solar, and wind - all of which are growing (probably in expected range or your predictions so far, but all above the expected values)

imnotlost• 4 years ago

The headline should be that Europe as 0 storage capacity so people will pay to get rid of the natgas (someone else should store it).

This is a temporary problem and does not mean the natgas issues are solved for the winter.

There was a similar issue with oil storage in April 2020[1]

[1] https://www.nytimes.com/2020/04/20/business/oil-prices.html

tenpies• 4 years ago

Exactly, we are witnessing supply destruction. It's worth considering that liquid natural gas is one of the most expensive (in both emissions and cost) to ship.

It needs to be held in special LNG carrier ships that can keep it not only at the right pressure, but the right temperature (against vast fluctuations). The crew on this ship requires special training and the ships carry a different insurance profile.

This is not like oil which is essentially held at room temperature in a water tight vessel.

Therefore just having LNG in a ship takes a considerable number of resources even if it's just sitting there. Crew and insurance has to be paid, refrigeration and ship costs add up, as well as the opportunity cost.

As you can imagine, getting the LNG that you very expensively purchased in the US, shipped, and then brought to Europe, is quite important. Every day delayed this becomes money that is not just being incinerated, but also not being maid.

What we are witnessing now is supply destruction, and as much as the ignorant journalists at CNN may celebrate it, this is actually quite bad long-term for Europe.

Coincidentally, the only other thing that is likely to be more expensive to ship is what Canada's Trudeau has promised Germany it will send: hydrogen. Thankfully that is likely to never happen as the promise was as limp-wristed as it gets.

LargoLasskhyfv• 4 years ago

Crazy idea...

Let them refill ships like these https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CMA_CGM_Jacques_Saad%C3%A9 at sea! While https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Slow_steaming

Like aerial refueling for military aircrafts, where the tankers are circling back and forth along the traffic patterns in the air!

labrador3• 4 years ago

What's wrong with storing it on a ship? Anchor it and pay a skeleton crew to keep it operational.

netrus• 4 years ago

I cannot imagine a happier person right now than the owner of a LNG tanker. Sure, using it as a dumb storage is a good business, but it's sure a better business to move the ship around to do arbitrage between gas markets with crazily different prices.

kgwgk3• 4 years ago

That you cannot conjure a gas tanker ship -and the required infrastructure- out of thin air.

labrador3• 4 years ago

They arrived full of gas with nowhere to offload. Those ships are what I'm suggesting wait until offloading is possible.

balderdash• 4 years ago

Nothing wrong with that, except the day $100-200k/day you’re paying for charter…

labrador3• 4 years ago

I think Germans can afford it and are willing to pay it to keep their economy going

ajross2• 4 years ago

If there were empty ships that could be filled, then clearly prices wouldn't have gone negative. Surely that reservoir is filled already (or the ships are empty and enroute to gas terminals, and thus already accounted for, etc...)

fomine3• 4 years ago

It will vaporize, I don't know how much

sebow• 4 years ago

Textbook clickbait article, though I don't expect (nor want) the title to be changed or the link to be removed because it shows how desperate CNN is for coming back into the mainstream.

The prices are not "zero" or "below zero". Maybe for the companies that buy gas in order to resell it to the average consumer, but the normal consumer does not get it for free or gets paid to burn gas randomly.This is what a layman understands when s/he reads the title, which is factually incorrect as per others have already explained in this thread.

On another note, I'm even skeptical to believe the gas storage across Europe is full. Because if that was the case, the prices should have began to plateau sooner up until now, instead of staying the same/relatively decreasing.

pvorb• 4 years ago

Completely unrelated, but I'm truly impressed that CNN offers a light version of their articles without any layout. This is really refreshing and a pleasure to read. I would like to see more websites do this and focus on the content.

Vecr• 4 years ago

cnn.com pretty much went down during 9/11 and I assume they tried to put in countermeasures after that, but who knows how well it would work after over two decades.

hulitu• 4 years ago

Europe now has so much natural gas that prices just dipped below zero

Is canabis legal in US ?

goatcode• 4 years ago

I'd be interested in how storage capacity has changed over the past 5 or so years. Has it been reduced for some reason?

lumberjack24• 4 years ago

well, they haven’t turned my building’s heating on yet.

exabrial• 4 years ago

Are we buying 0 gas from Russia so we can stop funding their war machine? Imho a total ban of imports is needed.

Gravityloss• 4 years ago

There have also been a lot of new interconnect pipes installed in the recent years. Basically all the way from Norway-Scotland-England-France-Poland-Lithuania-Latvia-Estonia-Finland it's part of the same network, although I'm sure there are bottlenecks.

Here's a recent new pipeline part: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gas_Interconnection_Poland%E2%...

Sprinkle some LNG terminals which have and are coming also online, and it becomes much more resilient.

There's a lot of this diligent infrastructure work going behind the scenes, away from the political drama.

isitmadeofglass• 4 years ago

Noone told my gas company which is still demanding about 10 times the normal price.

Europe now has so much natural gas that prices just dipped below zero

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