The U.S.-Asia Gas Partnership (AGP) is a public-private partnership that aims to optimize gas network infrastructure planning and develop domestic gas markets across the Indo-Pacific. The objective of AGP is to share best practices in the development of secure, reliable, and economic sources of natural gas. With a long-term vision to enable the creation of a regional gas market, AGP facilitates a shared understanding between government officials and the private sector about the technical, commercial, and economic factors that spur investment.
Under the AGP initiative, USEA, ICF and USAID’s South Asia Regional Energy Hub (SAREH) hosted a webinar on “Creating Traded and Competitive Gas Markets in Asia” on December 3rd, 2020. The webinar aims to provide insights on how the gas markets have evolved in the South East Asian countries over the past few years. Through a panel discussion, the esteemed panelists will discuss the best practices and recommendations for creating traded and competitive gas markets in these countries with focus on India, Singapore, Bangladesh, Thailand, Philippines, and Indonesia.
At present, wholesale gas markets in the Asia Pacific region are largely underdeveloped and do not seem to provide a foundation for development of market hubs within the individual countries due to various reasons like underdeveloped infrastructure, government control on gas allocation and pricing, third party access to pipelines and terminals.
LNG is the dominant supply for natural gas in the Asia Pacific region. The national gas markets in Asia Pacific are in early stages of liberalization with Singapore as an exception with its fully deregulated gas market. Despite being one of the major natural gas consuming region, the Asia Pacific region lacks a liquid transparent LNG pricing benchmark such as Henry Hub in the United States or the National Balancing Point in the United Kingdom.
There is a lot of interest across the region in developing such a hub, but the efforts to-date have been limited in part due to the absence of large volume pipeline interconnections or a significant spot market in pipeline gas or LNG trading. Multiple initiatives are underway to facilitate price discovery in the Asian LNG markets. Countries such as Japan, China, and Singapore are developing regional trading hubs in the Asia Pacific region and have also launched LNG pricing indexes like the JKM to increase transparency in price formation. Despite all efforts, there are more pre-requisites needed in these countries for development of market hubs that could enable price signals for the whole Asia Pacific region.
Therefore, the webinar focuses on the key issues and pre-requisites to create traded and competitive gas markets in Asia. Further, a panel discussion among the gas experts from these countries provides an insight on the stage of liberalization in these countries and the steps they plan to take to enable competitive gas markets in these regions.
