Ignoring The Message Gas Price Sends Makes Things Worse for EU

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European politicians are desperate, and desperate politicians thrash around and grab stupid ideas–any idea–that they think will alleviate the source of their desperation.

The cost of energy is extremely high now in Europe, and that is stoking political desperation. The politicians don’t like the price signals that the market is sending, and so they are exploring myriad ways of interfering with the price system. These policies (e.g., price controls) cannot solve the underlying problem: Europe is structurally short energy. Moreover, they will create their own problems, which will result in panicked reactions that will create new problems. Wash, rinse, repeat. The whole thing is doomed to collapse. In tears.

There is no better illustration of the European failure to come to grips with their real problems than some of the recent proposals surrounding LNG. One is to cap the price of imported LNG.

Brilliant! That way you’ll have even less gas, and the marginal value of power will go up! Yay!

Er, the LNG market is a world market. Yes, Europe collectively is large enough to have some monopsony power and thus can reduce price: but one exercises monopsony power by cutting purchases. That is, less gas will flow to Europe. Europeans will consume less electricity, and they will substitute higher cost ways of generating it. The shadow price (the opportunity cost, i.e., the real cost) of electricity and gas will increase, not fall.

Another proposal is in some ways even whackier: to replace the Dutch Title Transfer Facility (TTF) price with the Japan-Korea Marker (JKM) as the benchmark price for gas in Europe. Because the JKM price is lower. Or something:

As a last resort in case of supply disruption in Europe the EU could also explore temporarily pegging the TTF to the JKM Asian benchmark as a dynamic cap. Yet that would require the use of other hubs or mechanisms to allocate gas inside Europe, the commission said in the document on benchmarks for the wholesale gas market. “In this situation, JKM would become the world price for international gas for some time,” the commission said. “The wholesale market would be therefore determined by LNG supply/demand, and not by the EU’s internal bottlenecks. LNG would still be attracted by the fact transport costs are lower to the EU.”

In other words, the EC doesn’t like the basis between the price of pipeline gas in Europe (as measured by the TTF price in the Netherlands) and JKM. So, voilà! Make JKM the benchmark and tie the TTF price to the JKM price.

This begs the question of why the basis is what it is. The basis–the spread–reflects bottlenecks as well as shipping costs. If TTF is at a premium to JKM (which it is) even though shipping costs to Europe are lower, that means that there is some bottleneck to transform LNG on the European coast into gas in a pipeline on the continent. The most likely bottleneck is gasification capacity. The Europeans are scrambling to get floating LNG gasification facilities operating, but the basis/spread is saying that a lot more capacity is needed.

The EC concedes that TTF is at a premium, and that the premium has increased: ““The price premium between the TTF and Europe’s LNG delivered ex-ship indices has widened significantly bringing up questions about its representativeness as an index for linking the contracts in the whole EU-27.”

It only brings up questions to fools. Non-fools get it.

If by “pegging” the Europeans impose some spread between TTF and JKM (adjusted for shipping cost differentials) that does not reflect these EU bottlenecks and their associated costs, the supply of LNG to Europe will be reduced. The only way to incentivize the flow of gas from overseas into European pipes is to have a price that covers the cost of that transformation. If there are bottlenecks, that transformation is expensive.

Thus, it is utterly delusional to think that a price that does not reflect “the EU’s internal bottlenecks” is a good thing: you want a price that does reflect them. The bottlenecks don’t go away because you don’t let the market price reflect them. If you don’t let the market price reflect them, the gas will go away. (Asia will send its regards, by the way.)

You may not like the message the price sends, but you cannot wish it away. And if you try, the message will be sent in an even more painful way. The Europeans (and the UK) seem hell bent on proving this very basic point the hard way, rather than learning from the hard experience of others dating back millennia.


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Editor’s Note: The summary bullets for this article were chosen by Seeking Alpha editors.

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