Is Europe sleepwalking into its worst gas crisis since 2022? in General Energy News 28/03/2026 In a matter of weeks, the Iran conflict has rewritten Europe’s energy calculus. The benchmark Dutch TTF natural gas price has jumped from €38 per megawatt-hour to €54 month-to-date — a 70% increase that puts March 2026 on course to be the strongest monthly increase for European gas prices since September 2021. It is a number that carries weight far beyond energy markets. Europe’s gas vulnerability is not evenly distributed Europe entered this crisis already in a fragile position. Underground gas storage stood at just 28.4%, or 325 terawatt-hours, as of 24 March — 5 percentage points below the same date last year and well beneath the five-year seasonal average, according to Kyos European Gas Analytics. Germany is among the most exposed, with facilities only 22.3% full, down nearly 7 percentage points year-on-year. France is similarly positioned at 22.1%. The Netherlands is the most critical case on the continent: storage there has fallen to just 6.0%, or 9 TWh — less than a third of last year’s level and well below the historical minimum for this time of year. The contrast with the Iberian Peninsula could hardly be sharper. Portugal enters the crisis with tanks at 85.3% full, while Spain sits at 55.5% — both countries benefiting from greater LNG import infrastructure, lower gas dependency in their electricity mix, and a renewables buildout that has structurally reduced their exposure to wholesale gas price swings. How high could European gas prices rise? The supply shock at the origin is structural, not transitory. Qatar — the world’s second-largest LNG exporter at 84 billion cubic metres annually, and a key supplier to EU member states including Italy, Belgium and Spain — has confirmed it can no longer honour contractual obligations following Iran’s attacks earlier this month on the Ras Laffan Industrial City. Repairs to the damaged capacity could take up to five years. In a research note dated 22 March, Goldman Sachs raised its second-quarter 2026 TTF forecast to €72/MWh from €63/MWh, warning that European storage will need to attract LNG cargoes away from competing Asian buyers to fill adequately before next winter. An adverse scenario — in which Hormuz energy flows remain depressed for ten weeks rather than six — could push the Summer 2026 TTF average above €89/MWh, according to the bank. A severely adverse scenario, incorporating greater long-term damage to Qatari infrastructure, could see TTF above €100/MWh throughout the summer months. A poll of energy analysts conducted by Montel News puts even sharper numbers on those risks. Should Hormuz remain suspended for three months, the front-month TTF contract could rise to around €90/MWh according to Wood Mackenzie and Montel Analytics. At the upper end, Ole Hvalbye, commodities analyst at Swedish bank SEB, warns prices could range from €115 to €155/MWh in that scenario, as roughly 28.6 billion cubic metres of LNG would be removed from the global market. A six-month closure, the poll suggests, would push average TTF to nearly €160/MWh — what Hvalbye described as a “2022-style squeeze or worse,” with prices potentially ranging between €145 and €240/MWh, and filling storage for next winter becoming “close to impossible.” For context, TTF peaked at €345/MWh in August 2022 following Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. What this means for household energy bills For European households, the shock is real