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Saudi Arabia’s recent moves into the liquefied natural gas (LNG) market may be a sign the giant oil exporter is looking to expand into a rapidly growing and politically influential market it had long ignored.
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The relationship between the US and Canada, each of which is the other’s principal source of imported energy, has become increasingly fraught in recent months. Canada and the...
Reports by Tim Boersma & Tatiana Mitrova • August 07, 2018
The developments underway in Europe’s natural gas sector are some of the most influential and closely watched in the global gas market. In the past decade, Europe has seen significant demand swings, falling domestic production, growing concerns about dependence on Russian gas, and the advent of US liquefied natural gas exports to the world. Just as important has been the emerging competition from renewable fuels. Indeed, questions are now arising about whether Europe needs new investments in natural gas infrastructure or if those investments would become stranded assets. However, suggesting that the EU does not need new investments risks underestimating the role—or the potential role—natural gas plays in various sectors of Europe’s energy economy, including industry, transportation, and commercial and residential usage.
This paper analyzes the outlook for natural gas in Europe’s electricity generation, the most substantial market for gas in the continent, in the short and medium term (to 2030). The authors sought to create various scenarios that made increasingly bold assumptions about the costs of renewables going forward while at the same time addressing the absence of balancing costs of intermittent renewables in most recent analyses. The paper assumes a robust average carbon price over the forecast period in two of its scenarios, noting the highly complicated politics around more ambitious carbon pricing. Finally, the authors include all planned phaseouts of existing thermal generation capacity, per the reference case of the EU Energy, Transport and GHG Emissions Trends to 2050 as well as all recent national announcements concerning nuclear and coal phaseout.
In short, the paper finds the following:
AI’s growing power demand has received enormous attention in recent months. In many places, the lack of power supplies is an important constraint on the growth of data centers to train and run AI models.
Kenya and South Africa have recently started moving toward an open access regime in their electricity sectors, while the US and India have been on this path for over two decades.
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Reports by Tim Boersma & Tatiana Mitrova • August 07, 2018