Abstract
The European Union started the introduction of competition in the European market for natural gas. Today, mid-2016, the process of restructuring is still going on. In parallel, important changes in geopolitical, environmental and technological determinants can be observed in the European and global energy and gas markets. These changes have been highly influential in generating ‘reactive’ policies in the European Union, both in Brussels as well as in the Member States. The evolution of the European natural gas policy creating a strongly regulated version of a ‘well-functioning’ gas market remains a highly politicized and instable experiment. The values attached to natural gas are constantly shifting between the economics, to security of supply and sustainability. Moreover, the importance attached to these values and their operationalization are different in the various parts of Europe. Therewith, the creation of ‘well-functioning’ EU gas market will always remain a politicized and never ending story.
Highlights
20 years ago, the European Union started the introduction of competition in the European market for natural gas
The 2009 Directive, called the Third Package, was important in the sense that it unified the different national approaches. This was a reaction to the ‘Sector Enquiry’ carried by the Commission’s Directorate-General Competition [19], in which it concluded that lack of access to the infrastructure and dominant positions of only a few companies were blocking the development of a well-functioning gas market
We observe a continuous drive towards the creation of a competitive gas market by means of sector regulation, as regards the increasingly unbundled pipeline, storage and LNG infrastructure, and by means of competition policy, as regards the dominant positions of large suppliers and traders in the industry
Summary
Thereupon, a process unfolded which has radically changed the gas market in terms of its organization and coordination and the role—or even the presence—of specific types of actors involved. The overall energy and gas market policy objectives remain framed into the particular EU conception of how a ‘well-functioning’ market can be created in an industry that at least partially exhibits the characteristics of a natural monopoly [4]. This raises the interesting question to what extent the current European gas policy is able to continue on the path of, primarily, creating a ‘well-functioning’ gas market by means of a more or less constant regulatory intervention.
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