According to a recent Lord's debate the UK only has 5 days supply at peak demand, but are planning to re-open a mothballed storage facility to double this. As the UK gets 45% of its gas from its own domestic resources, the gas fields can be considered a huge gas storage facility.

https://hansard.parliament.uk/lords/2022-09-07/debates/9AFA9...

Historically, the UK has not had much gas storage capacity (even Rough wasn't that big) because gas wells have a reasonable amount of turndown capacity and those wells are directly coupled through St Fergus and other sites into gas cleaning and then into the national gas grid.

Germany has never had significant gas production and is heavily gas dependent so has built up storage facilities for strategic reasons.

The mistake made was that since 2004, the UK has become a gas importer with a greater fraction of imports every year. There was then a series of judgements made by successive governments that:

1) Gas was only a bridge fuel from which the UK would move away over time

2) The UK network is also essentially directly coupled into the Norwegian gas system which is and was massive

3) The UK has proportionately a very large amount of LNG terminal capacity

Therefore it was decided that it was not necessary either to develop more storage capacity nor indeed to pay for the re-completion of Rough in order to keep it operating. This now seems to have been a serious error.

This is particularly true because:

1) The UK, like The Netherlands, is almost entirely gas heated, Germany is also heavily gas dependent but heating mixes vary across European countries by a lot more than most people appreciate. This is because the UK and The Netherlands discovered gas early and gas is a brilliant heating fuel (apart from the whole global warming thing...). Norway, which discovered gas in large quantities only after it had already built hydro infrastructure and invested in electric heating, doesn't use much gas for heating domestically.

2) The UK has a lot of renewables and very little hydro and has therefore developed over the last decade into a gas + renewables electrical grid and closed its coal power plants. The great wave of nuclear AGR shutdowns has barely started but the Magnoxes are mostly offline already. Other European countries have kept their coal plants around either in daily use or on standby and are therefore able to bring them back. The GB grid simply doesn't have much idled but non-demolished coal capacity left on it.

3) Although, unlike most EU power markets, the GB electricity market is not pure "energy only" and has a capacity market, like those markets, electricity is priced at the marginal cost which in most hours is set by gas generation.

So the UK gets a double whammy of gas price effects.

All models and predictions will be based on assumptions, for example, there is a movement to not pay bills.

What if the people not paying decide that, since they are not paying, they might as well use as much as possible?

All it would take is a charismatic populist to come along and to promote such a thing for any reserves to be gone.

I am not sure that having LNG ports makes much difference if you have a minor currency such as Sterling and you have to just print more of it to pay for LNG. Other customers might have a manufacturing base or lots of gold, which would trump paper money.

Sterling is an anomalously strong and major currency given the UK's size and wealth.

...said my Dad in 2008.