No, Britain is not about to run out of gas |
Over the weekend, following continued US-Israeli attacks on Iran and the resulting disruption to shipping through the Strait of Hormuz, several newspapers warned that Britain has ‘just two days of gas’ left in storage. This line appeared prominently in coverage from outlets including the Guardian and the Times, leaving readers with the impression that the country may be only days away from running out. It is a striking statistic, but one that is also profoundly misleading.
Britain does indeed have relatively little gas in storage compared with continental European countries. But the implication that the country could somehow run out of gas within a matter of days reflects a fundamental misunderstanding of how the British energy system actually works. The UK gas network was never designed to operate like a giant reservoir. It was built around continuous flows.
Those flows come from three main sources. The first is domestic production from the North Sea, which provided an average of 43 per cent of Britain’s gas supply between 2020 and 2024. The second is pipeline imports from Norway, delivered through infrastructure such as the Langeled – one of the largest subsea gas pipelines in the world........