Europe's Gas Storage Is Emptier Than Any Time Since Records Began — And Winter Is Coming

European gas storage hit a record low for this time of year in March 2026. With the Hormuz crisis ongoing, filling storage before winter is now Europe's most urgent economic challenge.

The number that European energy officials most dread discussing in public is 28.4 percent. That is the fill level of European underground gas storage as of March 24, 2026 — and it represents not just a seasonal low but a structural alarm signal that the continent has not faced since the methodology for tracking European-wide storage was standardized in the early 2000s.

To understand why this matters, you need to understand how European energy actually works. The continent has limited geological capacity for gas production — Norway's fields provide some, the Netherlands' Groningen is largely depleted, and the North African pipeline network covers portions of Southern Europe. For the rest, Europe depends on imports: Russian pipeline gas before 2022, replaced since then by a crash expansion of LNG import infrastructure that has been the most impressive energy infrastructure project in European history in terms of speed of delivery.

The LNG solution worked — until now. The Iran war has created simultaneous disruption to supply (Hormuz restricting Gulf LNG flows) and demand (European industry cutting gas consumption in response to prices, but not fast enough to prevent storage drawdown continuing). The result is a storage level entering spring — the season when filling is supposed to begin — that is dramatically below where it needs to be.

Kyos European Gas Analytics, the most respected private data provider tracking European storage in near-real-time, broke down the numbers in a March 26 research note that circulated widely among energy ministers and their advisors. The headline 28.4 percent conceals dramatic variations: Denmark at 87 percent. Italy at 55 percent. Germany at 22.3 percent. France at 22.1 percent. And then the Netherlands at 6 percent — a figure so low that Dutch energy security officials have activated emergency protocols that had not been used since the Russian supply crisis of 2022.

If prices remain elevated through the spring, LNG cargoes that would normally be redirected toward Europe will go instead to Asian markets where prices are temporarily more competitive. That means less refilling during the critical April-to-October window. That means next winter begins with storage even lower than it is now. Goldman Sachs has modeled this scenario and described it as potentially more economically damaging than the 2022 Russian supply shock.