Contingent business interruption in energy

The glass plant is gas-fired, the gas arrives by pipeline, the pipeline comes from a compressor station that burns. Nothing is wrong with the plant, but it stops. That is contingent business interruption: a loss that starts with damage at someone else's site. In energy this pattern repeats at every link. A refiner depends on the pipeline that brings its crude, an LNG exporter on the pipeline that feeds it, a power plant on the terminal that supplies it. The market writes it as cover naming the sites the insured depends on, direct suppliers and sometimes suppliers' suppliers, with a sublimit per site and a deductible of several days. Identification is the hard part. The insurer does not want to cover dependencies it does not know, and the insured struggles to map them beyond the first tier. The Freeport LNG case, in 2022, showed that a terminal's customers lost margin of several hundred million with no policy responding. The Nord Stream case, in 2022, raised the question the other way: when the cause of the damage is state sabotage, the war or terrorism exclusion may apply at the supplier, and the customer's policy follows. So the cover stays narrow and expensive, rarely sold to full limit, and seldom shows up in programs. Not to be confused with utility service interruption cover, which handles grid electricity and water.