Is cheap US gas really pulling European factories over? Wholesale natural gas, TTF vs Henry Hub

The Reshoring Initiative 2025 Annual Report counts announced US manufacturing jobs from reshoring and foreign direct investment (FDI). It records 247,063 announced jobs in 1,509 cases for 2025 (page 7) and projects about 309,000 for 2026 (page 8).

On Western Europe, page 20 says: “This shift likely reflects continued geopolitical uncertainty, high energy costs in parts of Europe, tariffs, and the growing attractiveness of locating production closer to the U.S. consumer market.” It then adds a second likely reason: “Europe’s manufacturing cost is about 10 to 15% lower than U.S. cost, on average.”

Stated in its strongest accurate form, the claim is that high European energy costs are one likely contributor to Western Europe's share of announced jobs rising from 27% in 2025 to 40% in 2026* (Exhibit 4.1, page 17). The report does not say energy is the main reason, and it does not rank the four.

The United Kingdom shows the largest change of the four: 17,370 announced jobs in 2026* against 1,800 in 2025. France and Italy rose. Germany fell.

TTF is the Dutch wholesale gas hub, and our series for it is in euros per megawatt hour. Our Henry Hub series is in US dollars per MMBtu. To compare them, convert TTF with the exchange rate for the same day:

€89.11/MWh × 1.1076 USD per EUR ÷ 3.412142 MMBtu per MWh = $28.93/MMBtu.

The inputs are the OilPriceAPI daily averages for Nov 12, 2026: DUTCH_TTF_EUR, EUR_USD and NATURAL_GAS_USD. The same method and the same day give the same figure in our European gas storage fact check, and the steps are worked through in converting TTF from €/MWh to $/MMBtu.

The gap was widest in the week of Oct 26, 2026: TTF $31.94/MMBtu, Henry Hub $2.76/MMBtu, a gap of $29.19/MMBtu and a ratio of 11.6. It was narrowest in the week of Dec 1, 2025: TTF $9.56/MMBtu, Henry Hub $4.97/MMBtu, a gap of $4.59/MMBtu and a ratio of 1.9.

NATURAL_GAS_USD is the NYMEX front-month future, not the physical spot price. The gap is a gross figure: liquefaction, shipping and regasification come out of it, and we do not estimate those here. Current values are on the TTF, Henry Hub and European gas hubs pages.

Across 2025, TTF averaged $12.06/MMBtu and Henry Hub $3.60/MMBtu, a ratio of 3.3. The ratio was 3.6 in February 2026 and 5.8 in March 2026, when the TTF monthly average went from €31.89/MWh to €52.34/MWh. From July to October 2026 it averaged 7.9, and in October 2026 it was 9.4.

Almost all of the change is on the European side. Between October 2025 and October 2026, the TTF monthly average rose from $10.99/MMBtu to $28.20/MMBtu. Henry Hub moved from $3.36/MMBtu to $2.99/MMBtu. US gas did not get much cheaper. European gas got much more expensive.

These are the dates of the moves, not their cause. The report itself says, on page 16, that “The U.S.-Iran conflict is disrupting shipping routes and adding uncertainty to global supply chains.” We do not attribute the TTF rise to any single event here. Earlier context is in European gas and TTF in September 2026 and is US natural gas really 80% cheaper, which also compares Henry Hub with NBP and JKM.

The timing does not line up neatly. The report's 2026* figures are annualized from data through the first half of 2026. In those six months the gap averaged $11.51/MMBtu and the ratio 4.6, against $8.46/MMBtu and 3.3 across 2025. The gap of $20.16/MMBtu from July to October 2026 came after that window, so it cannot explain announcements already counted.

Companies rarely cite US energy prices. Exhibit 3.1 (page 13) counts the reasons given in announced cases. “U.S. Price of Natural Gas/Chemicals/Electricity” was cited in 16 cases in 2024, 18 in 2025 and 0 in 2026*. It ranks 23rd of the 27 factors listed for 2025.

A low count is not proof that energy does not matter. The exhibit counts what companies say in public announcements, and the report notes that announcements “do not always reveal the strategic considerations that shape manufacturing investment decisions” (page 16). It names three factors its survey weights more heavily than announcements do: geopolitical risk, close integration between manufacturing and engineering, and lack of a skilled workforce. Energy price is not one of the three.

The report offers other explanations. Beyond the four reasons quoted above, it says a 15% tariff applied to all countries “makes Europe non-competitive on a Landed Cost or TCO basis” (page 20). On page 16 it links energy to an earlier period: “Russia's invasion of Ukraine encouraged manufacturing FDI from Western Europe into the United States as companies sought greater energy security and supply chain stability.”

A hub price is not a factory's gas bill. TTF and Henry Hub are wholesale benchmarks. What a plant pays depends on its contract, hedges, network charges and taxes, and on how much of its cost is gas at all. None of that is in these series.

The average US industrial electricity price was 9.64 cents per kWh in August 2026, up from 8.98 cents in August 2025 (EIA Electric Power Monthly, Table 5.6.A; the 2026 value is preliminary). The EU average for non-household consumers was €0.18 per kWh in the first half of 2026 (Eurostat, for consumers using 500 to 2,000 MWh a year).

At the average ECB reference rate for January to June 2026, 1.1666 US dollars per euro, €0.18 is 21.0 cents: about 2.2 times the US figure. Eurostat's range runs from €0.09 in Finland (10.5 cents) to €0.27 in Ireland (31.5 cents).

The two figures are not on the same basis. One is a single month for all US industrial customers; the other is a half-year for one consumption band, given to two decimal places in the release. Read the result as “roughly double”, not as a precise multiple. It is a much smaller difference than the one in wholesale gas.

The price half of the claim holds. TTF has been above Henry Hub in every week we hold, from 1.9 times in the week of Dec 1, 2025 to 11.6 times in the week of Oct 26, 2026, and the difference widened sharply during 2026.

The causal half is open. The data here cannot say how much of the rise in European investment is due to energy. The report names energy as one likely reason among several, its own count of stated reasons puts US energy prices near the bottom, and Germany's announced jobs fell while the United Kingdom's rose.

Two things would change this reading: full-year 2026 figures that cover the months when the gap was widest, and announcements that name energy cost as a reason.

Three codes from /v1/prices/historical with interval=1d. The script skips Saturday and Sunday rows and keeps only dates on which all three series have a value, as this page does.

import requests
from collections import defaultdict
from datetime import date

URL = "https://api.oilpriceapi.com/v1/prices/historical"
HEADERS = {"Authorization": "Token YOUR_API_KEY"}
MMBTU_PER_MWH = 3.412142

def daily(code, start, end):
    params = {"by_code": code, "start_date": start, "end_date": end,
              "interval": "1d", "per_page": 500}
    r = requests.get(URL, params=params, headers=HEADERS, timeout=30)
    r.raise_for_status()
    rows = r.json()["data"]["prices"]
    return {row["created_at"][:10]: row["price"] for row in rows}

start, end = "2026-07-01", "2026-10-31"
ttf = daily("DUTCH_TTF_EUR", start, end)    # EUR/MWh
fx = daily("EUR_USD", start, end)           # US dollars per euro
hh = daily("NATURAL_GAS_USD", start, end)   # Henry Hub front-month, $/MMBtu

months = defaultdict(list)
for day in sorted(ttf):
    if date.fromisoformat(day).weekday() >= 5:   # skip Saturday and Sunday
        continue
    if day in fx and day in hh:
        months[day[:7]].append((ttf[day] * fx[day] / MMBTU_PER_MWH, hh[day]))

for month, rows in months.items():
    ttf_usd = sum(r[0] for r in rows) / len(rows)
    henry = sum(r[1] for r in rows) / len(rows)
    print(month, len(rows), f"TTF {ttf_usd:.2f}  Henry Hub {henry:.2f}  "
          f"gap {ttf_usd - henry:.2f}  ratio {ttf_usd / henry:.2f}")

Our TTF daily history starts on Dec 26, 2024. For earlier years, including 2022, use a longer public series; we do not reconstruct one here. Units, currencies and timestamps for Henry Hub, TTF and NBP are covered in natural gas benchmarks for developers.