Great Britain will stop supplying gas to mainland Europe if hit by shortages
Great Britain plans to stop supplying gas to mainland Europe if the country is hit by extreme shortages in the coming months, it has emerged.
National Grid could cut off gas pipelines to the Netherlands and Belgium under emergency measures as Russia’s invasion of Ukraine puts pressure on global energy supplies.
Shutting off the pipelines – known as interconnectors – would be part of a four-step plan that would include cutting supplies to big industrial users and asking consumers to reduce their household consumption, the Financial Times reported.
Ministers have been scrambling to shore up Great Britain’s energy supplies amid a squeeze exacerbated by Russia’s invasion on Ukraine. Russia has also ramped up pressure on other European nations by cutting their gas supplies in response to a rush to fill up European storage caverns before the winter.
The two undersea interconnectors that link Great Britain with Belgium and the Netherlands have been transporting their maximum capacity – exporting 75m cubic metres a day of gas to the European mainland – since March.
Britain has healthy quantities of gas supplies, including liquified natural gas imports, but low storage capacity.
The Investec analyst Nathan Piper said: “The interconnectors play an important role in European energy security, allowing LNG volumes landed in the UK to be transported into European storage in the summer that provide a buffer for volumes to be sent back to the UK where storage is limited, through the winter months.”
European gas companies have warned that shutting off the pipelines could backfire on the UK.
Bart Jan Hoevers, the president of the European Network of Transmission System Operators for Gas, told the FT: “I would definitely recommend they [the UK]
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