Natural Gas — The Three-Region Story
Henry Hub, TTF, JKM — the three pricing mechanisms and how to read them together
On August 22, 2022, the Henry Hub natural gas spot price settled at $9.85 per million BTU per EIA's daily Henry Hub spot series, the highest reading since 2008. That same week, in Europe, the Title Transfer Facility (TTF) front-month gas contract closed near €270/MWh — equivalent to roughly $80-90 per MMBtu at then-prevailing exchange rates — about ten times the U.
S. price. Two days later, on August 26, 2022, TTF reached an intraday peak of approximately €343/MWh per ICE Endex tracking, with the daily settlement near €314/MWh per European Commission analysis — equivalent to roughly $100 per MMBtu at the intraday peak, more than ten times the contemporaneous Henry Hub level.
The Asian benchmark, the Japan-Korea Marker (JKM), tracked TTF closely through the period, with Platts-published assessments above $50/MMBtu through much of summer 2022. Three regional markets, the same physical commodity (methane), priced more than 10x apart on the same trading day.
That is the opening. Finishing a lesson is where it stops being interesting and starts being useful: the full lesson runs to 7 sections and ends with 6 practice questions. A free account is what opens the rest, and the other 255 lessons in the Academy with it. No card.
What this lesson covers
- 1The three benchmarks — what they are, who trades them, how they price
- 2Why pipeline gas markets price differently from LNG-linked markets
- 3The LNG arbitrage cost stack — quantitative breakdown
- 4The three regional gas benchmarks — recent context
- 5August 26, 2022 — TTF intraday peak and the modern record for regional gas dislocation
- 6Where to see this on the platform
- 7Summary