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 – with Norway alone supplying three quarters of the gas Britain imports. The third is liquefied natural gas arriving by ship at British terminals, much of which originates in the United States, which provided 17 per cent of our gas in 2024.
Taken together, gas from UK and Norwegian fields accounted for 79 per cent of Britain’s total gas supply in 2024, with LNG imports and storage making up the remainder. So long as we do not go to war with Norway, and Iran remains unable to blockade the Atlantic to prevent American tankers reaching Britain, we will still have access to gas supplies.
The strait of Hormuz is not relevant, in supply terms, to Britain, as our imports from the Middle East are tiny. In fact, Britain imports roughly as much LNG from Trinidad and Tobago (1.6 per cent of total gas imports) as it does from Qatar (1.8 per cent). The backbone of the UK’s gas supply remains the North Sea basin and Norway, making Britain far less exposed to geopolitical chokepoints than many Asian economies that rely heavily on Gulf energy exports.
None of this means that Britain is immune from global energy shocks. If tensions in the Middle East disrupt global LNG markets, prices will rise. Britain participates in an integrated European gas market, and wholesale prices at the National Balancing Point tend to track movements at the continental benchmark, the Title Transfer Facility. In that sense, the UK may pay more for gas when global supply tightens. But that is a price, not a supply, problem.
In effect, Britain’s energy system functions more like a river than a reservoir. Gas is constantly flowing into the network rather than sitting idle underground waiting to be used. The shutting of the Strait of Hormuz will not have a significant impact on either LNG imports from America, our own extraction from the North Sea or what we receive from Norway. That is why discussions about our natural gas reserves, or lack thereof, is a red herring.
The implication that the UK could somehow run out of gas within a matter of days reflects a fundamental misunderstanding
This is also why comparisons with continental Europe are often misunderstood. Countries such as Germany maintain vastly larger underground storage facilities than Britain. Yet during the 2022 energy crisis Germany faced far more severe disruption, had to nationalise its biggest gas importer and was even pushed into a recession in 2023.
The reason is simple: storage does not insulate a country from market prices. Gas sitting underground is still valued at the prevailing wholesale price, and utilities must pay whatever the market demands to refill those stores once they are drawn down. Even a country with months of gas in storage therefore remains fully exposed to price shocks in the wider European market. Storage improves resilience against physical shortages, but it does not shield consumers from volatility. In 2022, Germany’s vast reserves did little to prevent the surge in energy prices that swept across Europe.
Headlines suggesting that Britain has ‘two days of gas left’ therefore do something quite dangerous. They take a technically accurate statistic about storage levels and turn it into an implication of imminent national vulnerability. At a moment of international uncertainty, when public reassurance matters, that kind of framing risks amplifying panic rather than improving understanding.
Britain faces many real energy challenges. An imminent physical shortage of gas is not one of them.
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