LONDON: Britain was set to import its greatest volume of gas from Belgium since December 2013 on Thursday, as a cold snap and an outage at Britain’s largest storage site began to bite. With British demand due to jump next week and British NBP prompt contracts climbing ever higher relative to their Belgian counterparts, British imports via the Interconnector pipe could ramp up further as part of a trend whereby Belgium consistently sends gas to Britain this winter.
Thursday’s shipper nominations at 11:00 London time showed 24 million cubic metres (mcm) of gas was due to flow from Belgium to Britain via the bidirectional pipe, according to pipe operator IUK. If achieved, this would represent the greatest British imports from Belgium since 3 December 2013. This is in stark contrast to the same day in 2015, when Britain sent 33mcm to Belgium.
The British imports were driven by a low Zeebrugge Day-ahead basis – the premium of the Belgian contract over its British counterpart. Wednesday’s Zeebrugge Day-ahead basis closed at -2.225p/th, below the threshold of around -1.80p/th which is required to incentivise shippers to send gas from Britain to Belgium. If the basis is higher than -1.80p/th, shippers typically send gas from Britain to Belgium. Typically, the more negative the basis becomes, the higher the Belgium to Britain exports.
