Most trade sources in a Reuters survey forecast spot Asian liquefied natural gas for December delivery to go no higher than $6 per million British thermal units, which would be the lowest for that month since Refinitiv began collecting such data in 2010.

They said January and February prices were unlikely to rise much above December’s level. Six dollars per mmBtu is lower than the current price of financial LNG contracts, indicating traders see them as overvalued.

Supplies of the super-chilled gas have been boosted in the past year by new terminals in Australia, Russia and especially the United States. This rise has upended gas markets in Europe, bringing continent-wide inventories to multi-year highs.

Spikes in crude oil and European gas prices over the past two weeks failed to alter the bearish mood. Industry sources said low spot buying from Asia and full stocks in Europe were the major reasons for weak prices this winter.

“I don’t see a clear premium market this winter. Japan is not growing, India’s buying is opportunistic, China was supposed to be the big place, but now it’s not. In Europe, once stocks are totally full there is no way this flow continues,” one trade source said.

Traders identified potential issues that in a normal year would boost prices - a looming Ukraine-Russia gas dispute, surprise outages, sudden cold snaps like the 2018 “Beast from the East”, to name a few. But stocks are so high, Europe could weather such problems.