31JUL

EU LNG send-out at 2,965.7 GWh/day

2 min read

09:44UTC

EU terminals sent out 2,965.7 GWh/day on the gas day ending 30 July against aggregate inventory of 27,213 GWh, with Spain holding the largest single stock at 9,145 GWh.

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EconomicAssessed

Key takeaway

Spain holds a third of EU terminal LNG inventory while non-EU reporters sit near 29% storage fill.

EU LNG send-out ran 2,965.7 GWh/day on the gas day ending Thursday 30 July, with aggregate terminal inventory at 27,213 GWh ¹. Spain held the largest single national stock at 9,145 GWh, a position that reflects its six regasification terminals and its weak pipeline links to the rest of the bloc rather than any surge in Spanish demand.

Send-out is the rate at which regasified LNG enters the pipeline network, so it is the tap feeding both burn and injection. Aggregate inventory across EU terminals is small relative to what the caverns still need, which is the reason cargo scheduling rather than terminal stock governs how fast Europe can refill. A terminal holding a fortnight of send-out cannot absorb a missed delivery window; it can only pass the gap through to the grid.

The uneven distribution matters more than the total. Non-EU AGSI+ reporters, meaning Ukraine, Serbia, Moldova and North Macedonia, sat at 28.95% storage fill on the same day, roughly half the EU aggregate. Those countries have neither Spain's terminal capacity nor Germany's cavern volume, and they enter winter on the thinnest position on the continent. The EU aggregate itself was already running six to eight points behind 2025 in early July , so the buffer above them is thinner than usual too.

Deep Analysis

In plain English

LNG (liquefied natural gas) arrives in Europe by ship and is stored at import terminals before being turned back into gas and fed into pipelines. On the day this was measured, Europe's terminals collectively held 27,213 gigawatt-hours worth of gas, with Spain holding more than any other single country, 9,145 gigawatt-hours. That gives Spain an unusually large buffer of imported gas sitting ready to use or resell elsewhere in Europe.

What could happen next?

Meaning
Spain's outsized LNG terminal inventory gives it more flexibility to redirect gas to other European markets than countries relying primarily on underground cavern storage.

Sources:GIE ALSI·GIE ALSI

Mentions:Spain →GIE AGSI+ →Serbia →Moldova →Ukraine →North Macedonia →Germany →

First Reported In

Update #31 · Caverns restart, 21 points short of November

GIE ALSI· 31 Jul 2026

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Different Perspectives

Spain's LNG terminal operators

Spain's 9,145 GWh terminal inventory is the largest single stock in the EU LNG network, an option value that can reroute cargoes wherever the winter strip pays best rather than a cavern gas obligation tied to a fixed date. That flexibility matters more as Germany's cavern shortfall pushes more of the winter security question onto import infrastructure.

European Commission

Brussels holds the bloc to 90% on a flexible window while Germany, holding roughly a quarter of EU storage capacity, tracks toward missing its own lower 80% figure by 21 points. A national shortfall this size in the anchor market matters more to bloc security than the flexible timetable alone can absorb.

French power exporters and CRE

French day-ahead rose in step with Germany but by less, reopening a EUR 7-17 premium that makes northward export flows commercially attractive again after the EUR 43.09 discount evaporated in days. CRE separately authorised RTE and Enedis to buy flexibility locally, betting the coming winter's binding constraint is grid congestion rather than a shortage of firm capacity.

TTF trading desk

A visible national shortfall like Germany's 21-point gap is a directional signal, not noise, for a desk holding the summer-winter spread. TTF's flat EUR 58-60 range through this week's German price swings says the market has not yet chosen to reprice refill risk into the front of the curve.

German cavern and CCGT operators

German caverns kept buying prompt gas at TTF near EUR 58-60 through the inversion; the wind collapse to 2.4 GW then flipped the spark spread to plus EUR 29 and put turbines back in the same queue. Every day turbines win that bid, injection at a third of the 877 GWh/day pace needed falls further behind.

Slovakia

Slovakia says it dropped its hold-out on the 21st sanctions package only after Ursula von der Leyen personally signed written gas-price and supply guarantees. The Council of the European Union's own 17,238-character release on the package names neither Slovakia nor any guarantee, leaving Bratislava's account unconfirmed by the institutional record.