Factories close, offices shut: what happens if the UK runs out of gas

The stove won’t light. The boiler won’t fire up. Pipes are frozen and the water has stopped running. Welcome to Christmas 2021. Amid a fierce cold snap, with another ‘Beast from the East’ blasting across the country, the UK’s meagre stockpiles of gas have been exhausted and the country is plunged into a crisis. Old people are dying and the rest of us are doing our best to keep warm. The closest thing to the apocalypse most of us will experience in our lifetimes has arrived.

Well, perhaps. It is easy to sketch out lurid scenarios of what might happen if the country runs out of gas. In reality, it won’t be that bad. Before we get there, we will see industrial closures and then some form of rationing. But that doesn’t mean it won’t be a serious problem. A gas emergency will cause huge disruption to the economy, widespread shortages and a political crisis from which even the Johnson administration, with its formidable powers for bouncing back, may not recover.

There is no question there is a real risk of a serious shortage of gas this winter. The price of every form of energy has rocketed in the past six months, but gas most of all. At the start of September, if you were in the market for a thousand cubic meters of gas, the standard trading unit, you could get one for just over $500. By the middle of the month, that had jumped to $800, and by its close it was above $1,000, an all-time high. By Tuesday, gas prices were up another 23 per cent. You don’t need to know much about economics to work out that prices only spiral up like that when increases in demand meet a squeezed supply.