European natural gas prices experienced a slight increase as concerns over the safety of transit through the critical Strait of Hormuz were reignited following an attack on a cargo vessel.
The European benchmark Dutch TTF gas futures price rose by as much as 1.6% on Friday, after declining over the previous two trading sessions, and was last up 0.11% at €40.79 per megawatt-hour.
Since the start of the week, European gas prices have been trading within a narrow range.
Despite a memorandum of understanding between the US and Iran and efforts to reopen the Strait, European gas prices remain more than 25% higher than pre-conflict levels due to market worries about the pace of refilling storage inventories ahead of winter.
Current stock levels in Europe's major gas storage facilities are just above 47%, which is below the seasonal average.
Several empty liquefied natural gas carriers are currently queued outside Qatar's large export facilities in the Persian Gulf awaiting loading.
However, any significant increase in gas exports from the Middle East remains contingent on the Strait of Hormuz maintaining safe and secure passage, a prospect clouded by Thursday's attack.
It was reported that Iran's Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps attacked a Singapore-flagged cargo ship in the Strait of Hormuz on June 25.
Later that evening, Iran's Persian Gulf Strait Authority issued a statement on social media declaring that all vessels transiting the Strait must follow designated routes and procedures, and that ships deviating from these routes would not be entitled to security guarantees or related insurance coverage, with all resulting consequences borne by the vessel's owner, operator, and captain.
Following the attack, the International Maritime Organization announced it was aware a vessel transiting the Strait of Hormuz had been attacked that day in the Gulf of Oman, and that the ship was not sailing under the IMO's dispersal plan.
The organization decided to suspend dispersal operations for vessels held up in the Strait to further verify whether relevant security measures remain effective.
Charbel Abi Daher, Chief Commercial Officer for Gas and LNG at Uniper SE's global commodities business, stated, "We are seeing risks rising, particularly geopolitical risks."
"Going forward, people can no longer ignore these tail risks."
Concurrently, energy consumption in both Asia and Europe is rising with the arrival of summer and increased cooling demand.
This could further intensify competition for seaborne LNG cargoes between the regions, potentially forcing Europe to continue paying higher premiums to secure sufficient supply.
However, a heatwave covering much of Northwestern Europe is expected to ease over the weekend, which may help curb gas demand.
Long Road to Recovery for Strait of Hormuz Capacity
Although the Strait of Hormuz has reopened, restoring its shipping capacity remains a work in progress.
According to the third-party website Hormuz Strait Monitor, the blockade of the Strait has lasted 116 days since restrictions began on February 28, 2026.
The site's real-time traffic overview shows that in the 24 hours to June 24, only 23 vessels were actively transiting the Strait, a mere 38.3% of the normal daily level of 60 ships.
On the more critical throughput metric, data from Hormuz Strait Monitor indicates daily throughput was only 2.4 million deadweight tons, representing just 22.9% of the normal daily average of 10.3 million DWT.
Another dataset similarly highlights the current bottleneck in Strait capacity.
Portwatch charts show that as of June 21, 2026, the 7-day moving average of vessel arrivals at the Strait of Hormuz was only 13 ships.
Notably, professional risk analysis firms have issued warnings regarding the crisis.
Kpler analyst Ana Subasic believes that all current questions about whether the Strait is "open" are missing the point.
Ana Subasic stated, "For most of the past 3 months, (the Strait being open) has technically been a yes. But this binary framework—open or closed—is now a useless way to think about Hormuz risk; building assessments around it is already outdated."
Ana Subasic argues that the 2026 Hormuz crisis is fundamentally different from the "Twelve-Day War" of June 2025.
In the 2025 conflict, vessel transits only briefly dipped and quickly rebounded, with the market soon digesting it as a volatility event.
The 2026 crisis is structurally different.
In the initial 12 days after the action against Iranian military facilities began on February 28, only 189 transits were recorded, a staggering decline of approximately 92% compared to the 2,310 transits in the same period of 2025.
He added that the impact of the 2026 Hormuz crisis is more complex and enduring than a simple blockade.
A vessel might be able to pass through the Strait, but if its positional data is degraded or falsified due to GNSS spoofing, making its movements unreliable to monitor, then that vessel's voyage record is already compromised, with consequences involving insurance and charter contract disputes.
Furthermore, subsequent negotiations between the US and Iran, and whether any agreement can be smoothly implemented, remain a key risk.
Some analysts point out that the US-Iran memorandum of understanding is only the first step towards stabilizing the regional situation, but the next phase of negotiations between the two sides remains complex and difficult, with the prospect of a final agreement still uncertain, and the possibility of a return to a cycle of conflict and truce cannot be ruled out.
Even if both the US and Iran wish to avoid a full-scale resumption of hostilities, Israel may refuse to fully "stand down" in Lebanon and could lobby the US to impose harsh conditions on Iran regarding nuclear issues, thereby complicating the path to a final US-Iran agreement.
Haris Khurshid, Chief Investment Officer at Chicago-based Karobaar Capital LP, said, "The market often treats the reopening of the Strait of Hormuz as if you flip a switch, but in reality it's more of a long-term process."
"Physical flows can restart quickly. Trust sentiment usually does not."
He added that reopening the Strait and normalizing trade flows are two different things, noting that many buyers and insurers remain persistently cautious, still wary of a repeat of a Trump-era "cry wolf" scenario, and that some buyers have spent months locking in alternative routes, suppliers, and inventories, and may not immediately return to this shipping lane upon its reopening.
Comments