October 27 2026 - 10:00am
Headlines this month have suggested that Britain might run out of gas this winter following warnings from Ofgem and National Gas about the resilience of the country’s infrastructure. This comes as European gas prices have reportedly risen to a four-year high. Yet these warnings concern a highly unlikely combination of events, rather than any expectation of actual shortages.
National Gas forecasts peak daily demand well within total supply capacity, but the concern relates to the so-called N-1 infrastructure standard. This requires enough supply capacity to meet demand on an exceptionally cold, one-in-20 winter day, even if the single largest piece of gas supply infrastructure fails.
That’s similar in principle to the electricity system’s requirement to withstand the sudden loss of a major generator or interconnector. However, unlike electricity, gas supply is concentrated in a relatively small number of large assets. The largest piece of gas supply infrastructure is the connection serving the South Hook and Dragon liquefied natural gas (LNG) terminals at Milford Haven in Wales. These terminals share a major pipeline connecting them to the high-pressure gas grid.
This raises an obvious question about why such important facilities were developed without independent routes into the network. The pipeline carries around 25 times more energy than the largest source of electricity supply — the interconnectors with Norway and Denmark. The consequences of the losses are also very different: electricity must be balanced instantaneously, so losing a major interconnector can rapidly threaten system stability if insufficient response is available. Gas networks have significant storage and alternative supply routes, allowing operators time to respond.
A theoretical breach of the N-1 standard therefore isn’t equivalent to breaching the electricity Security and Quality of Supply Standard. Nor is the probability of a catastrophic failure of the Milford Haven connection comparable to the relatively routine trips and outages experienced by electricity interconnectors.
Ofgem’s intervention concerns the Interconnector pipeline between Britain and Belgium, whose operator had planned to reduce import capacity by roughly half. Maintaining that capability is sensible insurance, but it may well have little practical relevance this winter. For the last five years, Britain has almost exclusively exported on the two pipelines to Europe, with minimal exports between 2022 and 2025.
The availability of additional pipeline capacity is of limited value if gas flows out rather than in. This remains the more likely scenario, because European gas tends now to be more expensive than British gas following the loss of cheap imports from Russia and the current low levels of continental gas inventories.
Britain is unlikely to face real risks to its gas supplies this winter. It has ample capacity from the North Sea — including Norway — and from liquefied natural gas, and the risks of a major pipeline outage, particularly onshore, are low. Nevertheless, the underlying infrastructure issue deserves attention given the decline of North Sea production, which has been accelerated by increasingly hostile fiscal and regulatory policies. If dependence on LNG was always going to increase, why was additional resilience not developed earlier? Options include constructing an independent connection from Milford Haven or developing additional regasification capacity elsewhere.
The problem is that infrastructure is expensive, and it would be perverse to spend billions replacing domestic gas production that could continue operating. A better solution would be to slow the decline of UK gas production by abolishing the windfall tax and lifting drilling restrictions. There are significant volumes of recoverable gas on the UK Continental Shelf and with recent Norwegian discoveries on its doorstep, volumes are likely higher than official reserves recognize.
Either way, Labour ministers should address these security concerns now rather than waiting until UKCS production falls further. Britain is unlikely to run out of gas this winter but that doesn’t mean the population can relax, as real supply challenges become more threatening each year. With the majority of households likely to rely on gas for heating for years and even decades to come, there is no room for complacency.
