The European reference price for natural gas, the Dutch Title Transfer Facility (TTF), soared this Wednesday morning to 194.715 euros per megawatt hour (MWh), a historic high, propelled by the war in Ukraine.
It therefore jumped 60%, before falling back to the very high level of 155 euros around 10:30 a.m.
On February 24, within hours of Vladimir Putin's outbreak of war, the TTF had jumped 21% from the previous day, and the megawatt-hour was trading at 107.615 euros.
The price of British gas for delivery next month has reached 463.83 pence per therm (a unit of quantity of heat), very close to its all-time high reached last December, at 470.83 pence.
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Russia holds nearly 20% of the world's proven gas reserves, of which it is the world's largest exporter.
The European Union "imports from Russia around 45% of its gas consumption, 30% of its crude oil and 51% of its refined products", explained Tuesday in our columns Pierre Terzian, director of the weekly newsletter Petrostratégie
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On the seventh day of the conflict, when Russia, far from curbing its offensive, claimed to have taken its first Ukrainian city,
Kherson, oil prices also jumped, with Brent crude hitting $113.02 - its highest since June 2014 - and the price per barrel of US WTI (West Texas Intermediate) oil hit $110.67 this morning, a record since 2013. Russia is the second largest exporter of crude oil in the world and the sanctions imposed on it could lead to supply difficulties when Russian oil represents 8% of the world's supply.
This is all the more so as the latest data from the American Petroleum Institute industry group showed that crude oil inventories in the United States fell by 6.1 million barrels last Friday.
The US Energy Information Administration is due to release weekly data on Wednesday, which could point to a rebuilding of some inventory.
It is in this context that the Organization of the Petroleum Exporting Countries, the OPEC + group, chaired by Russia, must meet during the day.
On Tuesday, members of the International Energy Agency agreed to release 60 million barrels of oil from their strategic reserves.
