September went up in its first half and spent the second half coming back down.

NBP day-ahead opened the month with the largest one-session gain our daily reports have recorded, 15.90p to 178.00p per therm on the 1st, went through 200p on the 10th, peaked at 207.35p on the 14th and settled the month at 178.00p, exactly where that first session closed and 9.8% above the end of August.

Unlike August, this was not a European gas move on its own. Oil moved with it, and the reason was the Gulf.

The climb ran on Norway and the Middle East. Dvalin maintenance and lower Norwegian nominations cut supply in the first week, and from the 8th an escalation between Iran and the United States, with strikes on shipping around the Strait of Hormuz, took Brent back through 100 dollars.

Day-ahead rose on five straight sessions, from 175.50p on the 3rd to 205.25p on the 10th, the Dutch TTF reached its highest since December 2022, and Asian LNG above 25 dollars pulled cargoes away from Europe.

The turn came after the 14th, as Norwegian supply improved and the weather stayed mild. Day-ahead slipped to 191.60p by the 17th, lost 14.10p on the 21st, the largest fall of the month, and a rebound to 190.00p on the 24th did not hold.

Calmer geopolitics took the prompt to 173.00p on the 29th, the low of the month, before outages at Njord and Troll and buying into the new gas year added 5.00p on the last day.

Brent finished at 98.03 dollars against 88.10 at the end of August, up 11%, having closed above 100 dollars for the first time since July on the 9th and reached 108.75 on the 15th as Houthi attacks on Saudi Arabia added to the shipping war.

Carbon followed rather than led. EUA carbon moved from €82.73 to €85.09 and the UK allowance from £59.39 to £61.41, with a 4.9% jump in the UK price on the 29th narrowing its discount to the European allowance to about €13.

The whole curve moved up, and the back of it kept the most. Summer-27 rose from 109.06p to 130.51p, up 20%, and Winter-27 from 106.19p to 125.45p, up 18%, while Q1-27 gained 11% to 181.22p.

Winter-26 reached 207.50p on the 14th and had fallen back to 184.70p by its last settlement before October expired, and Nov-26 is now the front month at 183.08p. The coming winter gave back more than half its rise inside a fortnight; next summer and next winter kept most of theirs.

Storage is still the weak point, and in Britain it went backwards. EU inventories rose from about 65% to 71.54% and remain roughly eleven points behind last year, and Germany has ordered an extra 8 TWh of injections by mid-December.

Britain’s reading climbed from 49% to 54% by the 21st, then fell to 41% by the 30th while every continental reading held still. Rough is empty, Humbly Grove is at 1%, and no LNG cargo on the end-of-month schedule was bound for Britain. The country goes into the heating season leaning on Norwegian pipeline gas and on storage that is already being drawn.

Power followed gas up and swung far harder on the weather. Day-ahead baseload, £130.50 per MWh at the end of August, fell to £72.76 on the 4th as solar pushed peak below baseload for eight sessions, rose to £176.00 on the 10th, cleared at £28.00 for a very windy Saturday on the 19th and jumped to £198.43 as the wind dropped away.

It closed the month at £160.11, up 23%. The forwards were steadier. Q1-27 baseload finished at £150.20, up 12%, and Nov-26 at £150.50, about 15p per kWh at wholesale before network costs, levies and supplier margin.