21SEP

Bruegel puts refill bill at €35bn

3 min read

15:34UTC

The Brussels think tank's estimate is the most precise public figure for the 2026 injection campaign: 55% above 2025, requiring 180 extra LNG cargoes.

← Back to Russia and China kill Iran's UN monitor Jump to analysis ↓

ConflictDeveloping

Key takeaway

Reaching 80% storage requires 180 extra LNG cargoes at an estimated €35 billion, 55% above 2025.

Bruegel, the Brussels-based economic think tank, estimated the cost of refilling EU gas storage to the revised target at €35 billion at €60/MWh, 55% above last year's equivalent costs. Europe needs approximately 180 additional LNG cargoes compared to last summer to reach the revised target by November. A gas price doubling from pre-crisis levels would add €100 billion to the EU's annual import bill, which was €117 billion last year.

Bruegel's policy recommendation includes an untested lever: a buyer coalition with Japan and South Korea, which together with the EU represents 60% of global LNG demand. Coordinated purchasing could counteract the cargo-by-cargo bidding war that currently favours sellers. No such coalition has been attempted at this scale, and the coordination challenges between three blocs with different regulatory frameworks and procurement cycles are substantial.

Deep Analysis

In plain English

A Brussels-based economic research organisation called Bruegel has calculated what it will cost Europe to refill its gas storage this summer. The answer is approximately €35 billion, using current gas prices, and that is just to reach the newly lowered 80% target. Bruegel has also suggested that Europe should try to negotiate as a block with Japan and South Korea, the other major gas importers, to avoid all three bidding against each other for the same limited supply. If they compete separately, prices go up for everyone.

Deep Analysis

Root Causes

The €35 billion refill cost reflects a structural illiquidity in the global LNG spot market. Unlike oil, where OPEC can release swing production within weeks, LNG supply is constrained by liquefaction train capacity that was committed 5-7 years earlier.

The US LNG expansion projects approved in 2019-21 (Sabine Pass Train 6, Calcasieu Pass, Plaquemines LNG) are coming online in 2025-26, but their output is 70-80% pre-committed under long-term contracts. The true spot market available to the EU is therefore a fraction of total Atlantic LNG output.

What could happen next?

Opportunity
A coordinated EU-Japan-South Korea LNG buyer coalition could reduce spot cargo costs by 5-10% through demand aggregation, saving up to EUR 2-3.5 billion on the 180 additional cargo requirement.
Risk
If all 180 additional cargoes must be sourced as spot, uncoordinated member state purchasing will replicate the 2022 competitive premium, pushing actual refill costs above Bruegel's EUR 35bn central estimate.

Source Landscape

This story draws on centre-leaning sources from Belgium

Belgium

LeftRight

Primary parallel: The 2022 European LNG emergency buying drove global spot LNG prices to $70/MMBtu by August, demonstrating the price impact of uncoordinated competitive buying by multiple national importers seeking the same spot cargoes simultaneously. Bruegel's buyer coalition is explicitly designed to avoid a repeat of that dynamic, where EU member states outbid each other in the same cargo auctions.

Counter-parallel: The 1973-74 US emergency oil purchase programme, under which the Federal Energy Administration centralised crude purchasing, managed supply during the Arab embargo but was criticised for driving prices higher through the scale of US government demand. A buyer coalition could face the same paradox: concentrating demand creates counterpart leverage but also signals need, potentially firming rather than softening spot prices.

Bruegel's €35 billion estimate at €60/MWh is the central scenario. At current TTF (€47/MWh), the refill cost for the same 180 additional cargoes would be approximately €27 billion. Each €10/MWh move in the average injection price changes the total refill cost by approximately €5.9 billion, making price assumptions the dominant variable in any refill cost projection.

The €100 billion additional import bill scenario (gas price doubling from pre-crisis levels) assumes sustained €60-70/MWh TTF through winter 2026-27. That scenario has a balance of payments implication for the EU: €100 billion represents approximately 0.6% of EU GDP, comparable to the energy cost shock of 2022, which was estimated at 0.7-0.9% of EU GDP in net external transfers.

Consensus view: Bruegel senior research fellow Simone Tagliapietra assessed that the buyer coalition proposal is the most institutionally novel element of the report: coordinated demand signalling by Japan, South Korea, and the EU (representing 60% of global LNG demand) could force spot price concessions from portfolio LNG sellers in a way that individual buyer negotiations cannot.

The structural parallel is the 2012 International Energy Agency coordinated oil reserve release, which temporarily reduced Brent by 8%.

Counter-view: The Japan Petroleum Association argued that Japanese buyers' long-term contract portfolio leaves limited flexibility to participate in spot market purchasing coalitions, and that Korean buyers' LNG purchasing is managed through KOGAS's separate state procurement function. A trilateral coalition would require new institutional mechanisms that do not currently exist and would take months to establish, making it irrelevant to the 2026 injection season.

Key tension: Whether the 180 additional cargo requirement can be met through coordinated purchasing or whether the physical availability constraint (total Atlantic basin LNG not allocated to Asian long-term contracts) is the binding limit regardless of buyer coordination.

Sources:Bruegel

Mentions:Bruegel →European Union →Japan →South Korea →Prima →International Energy Agency →

First Reported In

Update #1 · Europe's thinnest gas cushion since 2018

Bruegel· 13 Apr 2026

Read original →

Causes and effects

This Event

Bruegel puts refill bill at €35bn

The €35 billion refill cost and 180-cargo requirement establish the fiscal and logistical scale of Europe's storage challenge, making it a budgetary fact for government procurement planning.

Led to

Bruegel resolves refill bill at €26bn

Bruegel's three-scenario model resolves the EUR 35bn figure from ID:2363 as the mid-scenario (EUR 60/MWh), not the operative base case at current TTF.

Occurred 23 Apr 2026

Read story →

Germany net-withdrew 459 GWh on 13 April

Germany's continued net withdrawal undermines the Bruegel EUR 35bn refill estimate, which assumed Germany moving to net injection by mid-April.

Occurred 13 Apr 2026

Read story →

EU storage 32%, refill pace below target

Original Bruegel EUR 35bn refill estimate established the storage cost framework; the updated 32% fill figure and below-pace injection rate are measured against that benchmark.

Occurred 28 Apr 2026

Read story →

Storage 35.4% met, 80% trajectory missed

The Commission's April cut of the storage target from 90% to 80% sets the 80% November reference that the 0.257 pp/day floor is calculated against.

Occurred 12 May 2026

Read story →

Different Perspectives

Shipping and insurance industry

UKMTO counted about 20 US-facilitated Hormuz transits a day to 11 September against only 6 visible on AIS, with traffic still around 90% below the 138-a-day pre-war baseline. War-risk underwriters cannot price hulls they cannot see, or resolve whether the tanker El Gaia hit a mine, as Iran claims, or a missile and drone, as CENTCOM says.

European refiners

European refiners, including Poland's Orlen, absorbed a roughly $26 gap between Dated Brent at $130.80 on 15 September and ICE Brent futures settling at $103.87 on 18 September, a spread that widened from $13.45 on 9 September rather than newly opening. Their futures hedges no longer cover what they now pay for physical barrels.

Saudi Arabia

Saudi Aramco zeroed European term customers' October allocations and rerouted roughly 60 million barrels to Asia through Ras Tanura and Sohar, using Red Sea and Gulf terminal capacity built years ago to cut Hormuz exposure. Riyadh reallocated existing supply rather than negotiating a shortfall with Europe.

Qatar

Qatar's energy minister Saad al-Kaabi told Bloomberg at the Qatar Economic Forum on 20 September that Bessent's two-year Hormuz-obsolescence forecast is wrong, and that Doha has deliberately built no bypass pipeline. Qatar's gas exports run through one waterway by choice, not oversight.

Iran (foreign ministry and Majlis)

Iran's foreign ministry and 130 Majlis deputies moved toward NPT withdrawal this week, with lawmaker Hossein-Ali Haji Deligani filing a triple-urgency bill on 20 September that Speaker Qalibaf has not yet scheduled. Tehran treats treaty membership as leverage still on the table, not yet spent.

Russia and China

Moscow and Beijing vetoed the Panel of Experts' renewal, maintaining Resolution 2231 lapsed in October 2025 and the 2025 snapback was never validly triggered, so the sanctions architecture the Panel enforces has no current legal standing. Both governments frame the veto as upholding law, not shielding Tehran.