Europe Gas Price Surges Following Norway Outages, U.S. Tariff Delays

(Reuters) - Dutch wholesale gas prices rose on Monday morning, supported by an extension in Norwegian outages and a delay in U.S. tariffs on European goods, although activity was muted due to holidays in Britain and the U.S.

The benchmark Dutch front-month contract at the TTF hub TFMBMc1 was up 0.73 euro at 37.31 euros per megawatt hour (MWh) by 0821 GMT, on the Intercontinental Exchange (ICE).

Prices fell on Friday following the threat of a 50% U.S. tariff on European Union goods, Mind Energy analyst Karsten Sander Nielsen said in a morning report.

"The market is back up Monday morning as Trump has already postponed the tariffs again," Nielsen said, adding that outages at Norwegian gas production facilities were also adding to the upside for prices.

Norway's massive Troll gas field has seen varying degrees of outages over the past week, with operator Equinor on Monday morning extending capacity cuts to Saturday.

With maintenance outages also curbing capacity at other facilities, flows of Norwegian gas to Europe and Britain fell to 250.1 million cubic meters (MMcm) per day, down from 282.7 MMcm/day on Sunday, data by infrastructure operator Gassco showed.

The outages have tightened the European gas balance, leading to a reduction in net storage injections and further amplifying Europe's storage deficit, analysts at Engie EnergyScan said in a weekly note.

Gas stores are currently 45.9% full, about 22 percentage points lower than in the same period a year ago, Gas Infrastructure Europe data showed.

In the European carbon market, the benchmark contract CFI2Zc1 was up 1.79 euros at 73.35 euros a metric ton.

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