Thanks for the further detail - that indeed does not sound as worrying as I initially thought. And surely enough the Dutch and Belgians and Norwegians will sell some of their own spare capacity. At least the coming few years.

It would be an interesting exercise to follow each import connection and see what the issues on the other side are. What assumptions need to hold for these connections to deliver their capacity? Of course the whole peak story, but are there other complicating factors?

Dear Euan,
If we are rescued by a mild winter, then lower demand by what is left of our heavy industry may pull us through this time. I am more concerned about the next few winters coming up. I would suggest that If we are in a verifiable cooling trend, then each winter will more resemble those of my youth until even collapsing demand outstrips supply.

I would say that there is an increasing probability with each passing year of blackouts. This started in the winter of 2005-2006, and in each year after, the risk increases. We may stay lucky this year, but if luck is the only thing that underpins UK Energy strategy, then ultimately luck will run out.

Conoco in Aberdeen are believed to have sent out letters of intention of redundancy. That is today's big rumour. Where one starts, more usually follow. I suspect (but hope not) that 2009 may be as big a bloodbath in the oil industry as 1986.

Mr Brown must call an election by May 2010. If he does so any earlier (- and I doubt he will), there is a good chance it will be a candle-lit election. But I think it is probably too late now for base load security and I think we will be begging our mainland friends for help by 2010.
rgds and good luck
Dropstone

Euan, from your excerpts of your drafted post above;

Comparing the UK's annual demand with the planned capacity provides a massive sense of security. At peak, annual capacity of 200 BCM per annum is almost double the UK's requirement. However, as argued below, this is very misleading and provides a dangerous false sense of security for two reasons. First, it will be argued that there is unlikely to be sufficient gas on the international market to fill this capacity and second the annual cyclicity of gas demand creates problems meeting peak winter demand that is masked by annual data. These issues together with gas storage requirements will be dealt with in the following sections.

Bolding by me

That is what I consider vital to understand (as with many other things the devil is in the details) that annual supply/demand looking OK does not automatically translate into seasonal swings in demand/supplies as expressed in (Mcm/d or Bcf/d) are OK.