April brings more UK gas supply problems

In case you hadn't noticed, winter is not yet over in the UK, and today seems to have brought some new gas supply problems, though there have not been any public announcements about them yet. Below is the raw data, screen-captured from a National Grid website at 10am on 3 April 2013, with some commentary from me.

Here's the first problem - the Bacton interconnector is not flowing (again) - just like on 22nd March. You can see that hte Bacton BBL pipeline has stepped up a bit, but not enough to compensate:

On top of this, the Langeled pipeline has dropped off a bit:

Also, one of our own gas field terminals, St Fergus, is showing lower flow, which can only add to the problems:

Fortunately we have plenty of gas in the LNG stores at the moment, and extra supply is coming online as I type this...

Long Range Storage (from Rough) has also started flowing again - but bear in mind that it is all but empty, so can't do this for long.

The Medium Range Storage is a bit more healthy, and significant flows are coming out of these stores now:

 

So it looks like we're coping OK for now, but it really doesn't help the situation - in a normal year we'd be refilling gas storage by now, ready for the coming winter, but right now we're drawing the dregs out of it... Hopefully the Bacton pipeline will come back on soon - I'll keep this site updated.

Mike

UPDATE: Gas imports through the Bacton Interconnector restarted at 17:00 BST, albeit at a low level. Tomorrow's update from National Grid will show how much storage went down as a result of the lack of imports today.