The Technical Department for Oil, Natural Gas and Water Mining of Hungarian Mining and Metallurgical Society (OMBKE KFVSZ) and the Croatian Association of Petroleum Engineers and Geologists (HUNIG) jointly organize the „First Central and Eastern European International Oil and Gas Conference and Exhibition".
Mr. Ákos Füzi, representavive of IP Systems, presented a lecture on the liberalized gas market. Please find below the abstract of his presentation.
The EU 715/2009 directive and 2009/73/EC guideline stipulates free and non-discriminative access to the natural gas infrastructure systems. ACER, ENTSOG, ERGEG, EASEE-GAS and other initiatives aimed a better cooperation between European natural gas players and markets. The presentation demonstrates the possibilities of regional cooperation in the aspect of utilizing balancing markets, gas sources, capacities of Transmission Systems and Underground Gas Storage sites. Key message is that System Operators operate not only their infrastructure, but also a competitive market, for which – regardless that they are aware of it, they take all responsibility.
IP Systems is a specialized IT solution developer only for liberalized energy market. From this aspect it is important to emphasize that a competitive natural gas market is characterized by the following four criterias*:
If any of the above is missing, or limited, the market will be discriminative with limited competition. The infrastructure developed rapidly in the last few decades, as natural gas became available from more and more commercial contracts. The regulation forces the competition by unbundling trade activity from infrastructure management. Many of infrastructure companies give a third party access for IT platform using traders. More and more traders optimize their portfolio of gas sources and consumers. Beyond long term contracts, traders use short term bilateral contracts, OTC markets and exchanges. Traders are competing for the consumers offering gas & electricity bounded products, segment their consumers as it is well known from other liberalized industries, such as telecommunication or bank and financial markets.
The market is open, competition is started. Some players implement competitive business processes, some other do hope to keep their position without changing their business rules and tools. We are confident that the champions of the future will win in a competition using IT solutions for different purposes, such as product development of gas & capacity, pricing, capacity booking, nomination, allocation, market segmentation & forecasting etc.