Power grab: who’s hoarding all the gas?

Before Britain started worrying about a shortage of lorry drivers and petrol, we were fretting about a spike in wholesale gas prices. A couple of weeks and news cycles later, it would be easy to imagine that crisis had gone away. It hasn’t. On the contrary, global gas markets are preparing for a volatile winter. Britain, along with the rest of Europe, will face the full force of the crisis, raising the prospect of factory closures, if not general power cuts.

Like Covid, the energy crisis came from China but has spread worldwide. Last week, Xi Jinping’s government raised the stakes by ordering its state-owned energy companies to secure winter supplies ‘at all costs’, in effect declaring a global bidding war for increasingly scarce seaborne cargoes of liquefied natural gas (LNG) and thermal coal. For Britain, that has consequences. We are heading towards a bidding war for gas that China is determined to win.