How does Britain buy its gas: the NBP, LNG ships and Norwegian pipelines?

Britain buys gas at a virtual market called the National Balancing Point, or NBP. It is a virtual trading location for buying and selling natural gas in the UK, and gas there is priced in pence per therm. Behind that screen price, the physical gas arrives by three routes: from the UK's own declining North Sea fields, through pipelines, and on ships as LNG.

The NBP is the second most liquid gas trading point in Europe, and it has a major influence on the price that domestic consumers pay for their gas. A therm is simply a unit of energy, like a kilowatt-hour on your bill.

The pipelines matter most. Norway is the UK's largest source of imported gas, mainly through pipelines. Provisional figures for 2025 show that of 463,692 gigawatt-hours imported, 320,249, about 69%, came from Norway, and 104,360, about 22%, from the US, all of it as LNG. One pipeline, Langeled, runs 1,166 kilometres from Norway to Easington in England.

LNG is gas that has been super-chilled into a liquid so it can be shipped across oceans, from places such as the US, Qatar or Algeria. Production is concentrated: as of 2023 the US, Australia and Qatar had the most export capacity, which creates choke points. In 2026 the Iran war affected Qatar's LNG exports and the cost of LNG.

Other regions have their own prices. Europe's biggest gas benchmark is now the Dutch TTF, in euros per megawatt hour, and North America uses Henry Hub, in US dollars. On 11 March 2026, Carbon Brief put UK gas at 126p per therm.