Russian Gas Imports in Europe: How Does Gazprom Reliability Change the Game?

Joris Morbee and Stef Proost

The Energy Journal, 2010, vol. Volume 31, issue Number 4, 79-110

Abstract: Europe’s dependence on Russian gas imports has been the subject of increasing political concern after gas conflicts between Russia and Ukraine in 2006 and 2009. This paper assesses the potential impact of Russian unreliability on the European gas market, and how it affects European gas import strategy. We also study to what extent Europe should invest in strategic gas storage capacity to mitigate the effects of possible Russian unreliability. The European gas import market is described by differentiated competition between Russia and a – more reliable – competitive fringe of other exporters. The results show that Russian contract volumes and prices decline significantly as a function of unreliability, so that not only Europe but also Russia suffers if Russia’s unreliability increases. For Europe, buying gas from more reliable suppliers at a price premium turns out to be generally more attractive than building strategic gas storage capacity.

JEL-codes: F0 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2010
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (9)

Downloads: (external link)
http://www.iaee.org/en/publications/ejarticle.aspx?id=2398 (text/html)
Access to full text is restricted to IAEE members and subscribers.

Related works:
Journal Article: Russian Gas Imports in Europe: How Does Gazprom Reliability Change the Game? (2010)
Working Paper: Russian gas imports in Europe: how does Gazprom reliability change the game? (2008)
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:aen:journl:2010v31-04-a04

Ordering information: This journal article can be ordered from
http://www.iaee.org/en/publications/ejsearch.aspx

Access Statistics for this article

More articles in The Energy Journal from International Association for Energy Economics Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by David Williams ().