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ENTSOG: EU stocks at 28% entering injection season

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ENTSOG's Summer Supply Outlook 2026 recorded EU gas stocks at 28% on 1 April, six percentage points below the Summer 2025 start, at pre-energy-crisis levels and prompting General Director Piotr Kus to call for urgent April injection.

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Key takeaway

EU storage began injection season at 28%, six points below last summer, against a fixed regasification ceiling.

The European Network of Transmission System Operators for Gas (ENTSOG) published its Summer Supply Outlook 2026 on 9 April 2026, recording EU gas stocks at 28% (314 TWh, approximately 29 bcm) on 1 April, at pre-energy-crisis levels and six percentage points below the Summer 2025 start of 34% ¹. ENTSOG General Director Piotr Kus stated that "it is critical to start injecting gas as early as April."

ENTSOG is the Brussels-based association of EU gas transmission system operators that publishes the authoritative seasonal flow outlook. The 28% starting level is the lowest 1 April reading since the 2022 supply crisis and sits 66 points below the November 2025 peak of 94%. Europe enters injection season already behind, and the reference year it is falling behind to is itself a year the bloc failed to close the buffer it opened.

The underlying trajectory matters more than any single reading. Summer 2025 ended at 83% against 94% for Summer 2024, meaning last year already failed to close the buffer it opened, while the LNG share of EU supply rose from 29.2% to 37.8% as pipeline gas fell away ². The infrastructure envelope is now carrying more of the supply task at the same time the physical limit of that envelope becomes binding. ENTSOG puts the EU LNG regasification capacity ceiling at approximately 1,600 TWh per winter season (roughly 145 bcm), which is a hard physical limit that cannot be expanded inside the injection window ³.

ENTSOG's own LNG Tight stress scenario is now the most relevant forward case, because the supply side is already tracking inside it rather than the base. EU aggregate injection matched 2025 pace over the first two weeks of April rather than accelerating, while the cost ran at least $300 million above the equivalent window. Matching pace at a higher cost does not close a six-point deficit; it locks it in. With Germany's anchor estate still net-withdrawing and the 25 April Russian LNG ban approaching, the physical route to a better November fill depends on peripheral estates covering what the anchor is not filling, inside a regasification ceiling that does not move.

Deep Analysis

In plain English

European countries store gas underground each summer so they have reserves to draw from during winter. Think of it like filling a giant underground battery. At the start of this injection season, European storage was only 28% full similar to levels seen before the 2022 energy crisis. The body that coordinates European gas network operators says the bloc needs to inject gas urgently starting in April to have any hope of reaching the 80% target by November. The problem is that multiple other things a closed gas route through the Persian Gulf, a Norwegian plant shutting for maintenance, and broken commercial incentives in Germany are all making injection harder and more expensive at exactly the same moment.

Deep Analysis

Root Causes

The 28% starting position is the compounded result of two consecutive injection seasons that fell short of their targets. Summer 2024 ended at 94%; Summer 2025 ended at 83%, a deficit of eleven percentage points. Each shortfall becomes the starting condition for the next season. The mechanism is structural: the bloc is drawing on a buffer it is not refilling at the rate it is drawing it down.

The shift in supply composition LNG's share rising from 29.2% to 37.8% makes the starting position more fragile, not less, because LNG is price-responsive and route-sensitive in ways pipeline gas is not. A pipeline contract delivers its volume regardless of the JKM-TTF spread; an LNG cargo does not. As LNG's share of the supply mix rises, the marginal molecule becomes more sensitive to global market conditions outside European policy control.

The ENTSOG regasification ceiling of 145 bcm per winter season is the physical expression of the supply composition problem: the infrastructure can absorb a certain amount of LNG, and no amount of policy can expand that envelope inside the injection window. Commissioning new regasification capacity takes 18-36 months minimum.

What could happen next?

Risk
The regasification ceiling at 145 bcm per winter season is a hard physical constraint that cannot be expanded during the injection window, making any supplementary supply route structurally limited.
Immediate · 0.9
Consequence
Two consecutive below-target injection seasons compound into a structural storage deficit that cannot be recovered without either a step-change in LNG supply or a structural reduction in European gas demand.
Medium term · 0.8
Risk
Peripheral EU member states running hotter injection rates to compensate for Germany's anchor-estate withdrawal face their own storage economics strain and cannot sustain compensation indefinitely.
Short term · 0.72

Source Landscape

This story draws predominantly on Russia state media, with sources from Russia

Russia

Primary parallel: Summer 2021 began with EU stocks at 30% on 1 April close to the 28% 2026 reading and the bloc ended the injection season at approximately 77%, short of the 90% target, because injection costs became uneconomical in September.

The 2021 episode confirmed that a weak 1 April position creates a compounding deficit: the lower the starting point, the more consecutive weeks of above-average injection are required, and the longer the window during which any interruption materially affects the outcome.

Counter-parallel: In Summer 2019, EU stocks started at a similarly low 33% and reached 95% by November, demonstrating that a low starting position is recoverable given a mild summer and functioning injection economics. The structural difference in 2026 is that ENTSOG itself identifies the regasification ceiling at 145 bcm per winter season as a hard physical constraint a ceiling that did not bind in 2019 because LNG's share of the supply mix was only 29%, against 37.8% in Summer 2025.

The $300m cost premium on 1.9 bcm of April injection implies a per-MWh injection cost approximately EUR 4.80 above the 2025 equivalent enough to make unsubsidised injection commercially unattractive for most operators without long-term offtake certainty.

The OIES-assessed 6 bcm additional requirement, expressed as a daily injection rate, requires approximately 110 GWh per day of additional throughput above last year's pace through the injection season. At current infrastructure utilisation rates, achieving that throughput requires running regasification terminals at close to 85-90% of stated nameplate capacity continuously a rate that historically produces reliability issues.

Consensus view: The IEA's Gas Market Report Q1 2026 aligns with ENTSOG's 28% reading, noting that EU stocks at 1 April represent the weakest injection-season starting position since 2018 and that the 80% November target already lowered from 90% requires a higher sustained injection rate than Europe has achieved in any comparable summer since 2020.

Counter-view: Ember's gas-to-power analytics team argues the storage trajectory overstates the risk by ignoring the demand-destruction effect already built into EU industrial consumption: European chemical and fertiliser manufacturing capacity has contracted by roughly 9% since 2022 , meaning the system needs less gas to serve the same economic output than ENTSOG's historical models assume.

Key tension: Whether demand-destruction has permanently reduced the winter requirement sufficiently to make 80% fill adequate, or whether any cold-weather deviation from the mild baseline restores demand faster than the contracted industrial capacity can fall back.

Sources:EADaily

Mentions:European Union →GIE AGSI+ →Russian LNG →Persian Gulf →Prima →Germany →Ember →Russia →ENTSOG →Piotr Kus →International Energy Agency →LNG Prime →

First Reported In

Update #3 · TTF holds six-week low as supply stack hardens

EADaily· 17 Apr 2026

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Causes and effects

Caused by

EU gas storage at 29.55% on 13 April

EU aggregate storage at 29.55% on 13 April set the baseline against which the first-two-week injection rate of 1.9 bcm is measured.

Occurred 13 Apr 2026

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This Event

ENTSOG: EU stocks at 28% entering injection season

The bloc enters its refill window from a deficit it failed to close last year, against a hard regasification ceiling that cannot be expanded inside the injection season.

Different Perspectives

Germany

Germany holds the EU's largest storage estate but entered injection season at 23.32% fill with a 4.3 TWh/day injection ceiling that physically prevents any sprint recovery; the Bundeswirtschaftsministerium has maintained its early warning stage since July 2025. An escalation to Alarmstufe, which would trigger compulsory injection obligations, remains live if storage fails to rise through April.

QatarEnergy

QatarEnergy declared force majeure on European LNG contracts citing Ras Laffan strike damage, while the Gulf Research Centre assessed the declaration may also reflect a commercial decision to reallocate volumes toward higher-priced Asian spot markets without triggering breach penalties. Independent engineering confirmation of damage extent has not been published, leaving legal and commercial uncertainty unresolved.

Equinor / Norway

Norway remains the EU's largest pipeline gas supplier and benefits from sustained elevated TTF; Norwegian pipeline capacity has partially offset the Russian supply loss but cannot close the structural gap. Norway Zone 4 power prices at EUR 2/MWh on 13 April illustrate how hydro-dominated systems are structurally decoupled from the gas price shock affecting continental Europe.

Italy

Italy cleared day-ahead power at EUR 133/MWh on 13 April, four to five times the Iberian equivalent, because gas-fired plants set the marginal price for approximately 90% of generation hours. Italy's circa 40 GW of gas-fired CCGT capacity, built when gas was cheap and nuclear was politically blocked, is now a structural liability at EUR 47/MWh TTF.

Spain

Spain cleared at EUR 29/MWh on the same day Italy paid EUR 133/MWh, the starkest single-day demonstration that its renewable energy investment is translating directly into price shock insulation for industry. Iberian interconnector constraints at the Pyrenees mean Spain cannot export this advantage to northern European markets at scale.

Japan and South Korea

Japan and South Korea are competing with Europe for the same Atlantic LNG cargoes as Ras Laffan tightens global supply; their long-term contract portfolios provide partial insulation but leave both exposed on spot volumes. Bruegel proposed a trilateral buyer coalition representing 60% of global LNG demand, but Tokyo and Seoul have not formally responded.