EU working towards interconnected liquid gas market

By Sibel Akbay

ISTANBUL

The European Union is working towards becoming a single interconnected liquid gas market, in line with the standards set for the COP21 agreement in Paris to combat climate change, Maros Sefcovic, the vice-president for Energy Union of the European Commission, said.

Speaking at the World Energy Congress, of which Anadolu Agency is the global communication partner for 2016, Sefcovic said the Paris agreement would push European policy makers to adopt clean energy and avoid mistakes of the past.

“We currently use 22-30 percent of our LNG capacity in Europe,” Sefcovic said. “This is due to technical and political reasons. We want to change this status quo and work towards creating one liquid energy market for the European Union (EU) in our move towards cleaner energy,” he added.

Sefcovic also said the EU at the moment did not have the consensus to introduce “carbon tax.”

“The best we can do is form an emissions trade system and a carbons market and we are working on those,” he explained.

Chief Executive Officer of Gaznat, Rene Bautz, which supplies and transports high-pressure natural gas to Western Switzerland, said the use of gas in the transportation sector should be encouraged in the move towards cleaner energy.

“The use of CNG (compressed natural gas) to fuel cars and ships must be encouraged,” Bautz, who is also the chairman of Switzerland-based Global Gas Center, said.

"There is also a lot of room for natural gas vehicles on the roads. The current market share of such vehicles in the whole of Europe is about 1 percent. This ratio can well be increased given that in Italy, there are one million natural gas vehicles,” he said.

Bautz also indicated that building gas-fired power plants would be another way of helping reduce carbon emissions in Europe.

World Bank positive in transition to gas

The World Bank stood very positive in terms of the global transition to natural gas and expected gas to start paying a much more important role in many countries in the near future, Bjorn Hamso, senior manager, at the Global Gas Flaring Reduction Partnership for the World Bank, said.

“We support the replacement of coal,” Hamso said, adding that “in urban areas, we think this transition should become quick as natural gas is no good for air pollution.”

Hamso also shared that as about 1.1 billion people globally have no access to commercial and clean fuel, the goal of the World Bank is to reach them.

Gas markets should become flexible

For gas to start playing a big role in the future global energy mix, gas markets have to work on becoming more flexible, Claudia Cronenbold, president of the Bolivian Chamber of Hydrocarbons and Energy at the World Energy Council, said.

“Gas will play an important role in the future but the question is how big it will be,” she said.

“Significant challenges remain in the gas market for infrastructure and pricing. Different local market prices affect the competitiveness of the industry. Markets must definitely change towards more flexibility,” she added.

Demand for gas still remains a problem in world energy markets and a strong business model for gas in power generation has to be created to change that, Chief Executive Officer of Edison Spa, Marc Benayoun, said.

“A lot of value was lost in the financial crisis eight years ago. The benefits of gas are clearly there but we need to push demand forward,” he said.