European gas has had an uneventful summer, which is itself the story. Front-month contracts at the Dutch TTF hub averaged close to €31 per megawatt hour between April and September, against roughly €45 in the same period of 2024, and realised volatility has fallen to its lowest level since 2020.
Three things explain the change. Storage entered the winter at comfortable levels, LNG supply from the United States and Qatar has been steady, and demand has not recovered: chemical and glass producers in Germany and the Netherlands never returned to their pre-2022 consumption, and what remains has been partly electrified.
The industrial response has been to shorten hedging horizons. Where buyers once contracted three years ahead as a matter of course, many now work in rolling twelve-month tranches with a smaller core position. That reduces the cost of being wrong but leaves more exposure to a cold start to the winter.
The risk is not a return to 2022. It is a narrower, more ordinary risk: a cold snap coinciding with Norwegian maintenance and strong Asian competition for LNG cargoes. That combination could still move prices sharply for a few weeks, and buyers with short hedges would feel it first.