Building Gas Markets: US versus EU, market versus market model

Abstract

The liberalization process of the gas sector has showed that the reasoning to introduce competition in gas industries separates the services in at least two groups: commodities with relatively low transaction costs, and hence suitable to short-term market coordination, and network services which concentrate most of the specificities related to the physical flows. However, the way to coordinate such network services is still under debate. In this view, in USA specific services are coordinated through long term contracts, whereas the EU regulatory frame socializes the costs of the network services. In this paper, we develop a general analysis of the major consequences of this fundamental regulatory choice. In addition, we build on such analysis to explain the differences among the current proposals to design the coming European Internal Market.