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

Cross-border power traders

The France-Germany day-ahead spread flipped from a EUR 17.20 German premium on 1 August to a EUR 4.15 French premium on 3 August, the same day French curtailment peaked. They cannot yet attribute the flip to curtailment alone, since a like-for-like overnight comparison shows French nuclear output rising while wind fell and demand returned on the weekday step.

EDF

River-cooling limits took 7.6 GW, 12 per cent of its fleet, offline on 3 August, the highest curtailment since the heatwave began, with an easing forecast to 4.3 GW on 4 August and 3 GW after. It manages the cut as a recurring seasonal constraint, expecting it to lift with river temperature, not repair.

Gasunie

TTF, the Dutch hub it operates, drifted to roughly EUR 55 to 58 per MWh across the window, staying inside its recent range through both the German spark reversal and the French curtailment. It reads a flat hub price as evidence that neither event this window carried enough weight to move the fuel leg on its own.

German gas-fired generators

Record German solar of 18,761 MW on 2 August pushed the clean spark spread to minus 18.48 EUR/MWh, a loss-making day, before it returned to plus 16.20 on 3 August. They now price dispatch against post-solar residual load rather than wind alone, since the sign flipped inside 48 hours on unchanged fuel and carbon costs.

European Commission (DG Energy)

Its implementing-measures register logged transposition notices from only Portugal and Slovakia against Wednesday's Article 94 deadline for Directive (EU) 2024/1788, with 25 states silent. It expects the register to fill only gradually, since filing routinely lags legislating and any infringement track against non-notifying states runs on a slower clock than the deadline itself.

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.