Natural gas spot prices in the UK rose by than 30% late last week after the market digested news of an explosion and fire at the Freeport LNG export terminal in Brazoria County, Texas.
Freeport LNG handles 20% of America’s LNG exports (most of it contracted to Japan), and it was expected to remain offline for at least three weeks. That would have supply ramifications for an already stressed global natural gas market.
The fire following the Wednesday June 8th explosion was extinguished quickly and the situation was stabilized by the end of the day. No injuries or pollution were reported.
The majority of US LNG goes to supply the European market. The outage was estimated as likely to remove more than a dozen cargoes from the market this summer, amounting to nearly 1m tonnes of LNG that will not be available to replenish Europe’s storage before winter.
