Is China's natural gas market globally connected?

Abstract

The rise of the shale gas industry and the need for clean, low-carbon energy transformation in China has meant that the relationship between domestic and foreign natural gas markets has become closer. Therefore, identifying the changing relationships between the major global natural gas markets and China's natural gas market has important practical value for the current Chinese domestic natural gas pricing system. This paper used the DCC-GARCH-NARDL-ARDL-ECM as the analytical framework to study these relationships, from which it was found that there was no unified global natural gas market and that China's natural gas market was not yet aligned with this market. It was shown that there was no significant asymmetry in the impact of international gas prices on China's gas prices as no flexible adjustment measures were found in China's imported natural gas pricing mechanism. Moreover, while international natural gas prices were found to have a significant impact on China's natural gas prices over the long term, there were obvious regional differences over the short term. Accordingly, new pricing policies should be designed to promote market-oriented natural gas pricing reforms in acknowledging features such as asymmetry, the difference between imported gas sources and the periodicity of price adjustment.