Auction design for gas pipeline transportation capacity--The case of Nabucco and its open season

Matthias Pickl and Franz Wirl

Energy Policy, 2011, vol. 39, issue 4, 2143-2151

Abstract: As a response to the Russian dominance of the EU's natural gas supplies and the EU's increasing gas demands, major gas pipeline projects are currently under way to enhance the EU's energy supply security. Oftentimes to raise financing and to allocate gas transportation capacities, auctions are carried out to allow gas shippers to book transportation rights. In recent years, auctions have emerged as one of the most successful allocation mechanisms in the microeconomic theory. However, different auction designs can lead to different outcomes making the choice of auction design a decisive one, especially for divisible-good auctions. This paper seeks to give a formulation of an optimal auction design for gas pipeline transportation capacity. Specifically three different mechanisms are tested: (i) NPV allocation; (ii) pro rata allocation; and (iii) optimization. In addition, Nabucco is taken as a case study to empirically show results of such auction designs. Results show that a trade-off between revenue optimization and fair allocation can be observed: allocation per optimization is the favorable auction design when revenue maximization is more important than fair allocation. On the other hand, pro rata allocation is the auction design to be chosen when fairness of allocation is considered most central.

Keywords: Gas; pipeline; Auction; Allocation (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2011
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (2)

Downloads: (external link)
http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0301-4215(11)00072-3
Full text for ScienceDirect subscribers only

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:eee:enepol:v:39:y:2011:i:4:p:2143-2151

Access Statistics for this article

Energy Policy is currently edited by N. France

More articles in Energy Policy from Elsevier
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Catherine Liu ().