European Natural-Gas Trading Rose 11% Last Year
Natural-gas trading volumes in Europe rose last year on increased activity in the U.K. and Germany, even as consumption of the fuel dropped, Prospex Research Ltd. said.
Gas contracts bought and sold in the region, including over-the-counter deals, exchange trades and unrecorded over-the- counter transactions, rose 11 percent to 21,856 terawatt-hours, the London-based consultants said in a draft of a report scheduled for publication tomorrow.
European trading in the fuel remains dominated by the U.K., where the volume of traded contracts was almost 17 times greater than consumption. Buyers and sellers included the utilities Centrica Plc and Scottish & Southern Energy Plc and banks such as Morgan Stanley and Goldman Sachs Group Inc. Europe’s biggest market for the fuel accounted for more than three quarters of the regional trading volume, according to the report.
“The double impact of a financial-market crisis followed by economic recession hit the U.K. market harder than the smaller and younger mainland markets,” authors including Nigel Harris of Kingston Energy Consulting Ltd. wrote in the report. “By mid-2009, the U.K.’s trading activity had picked up again and continued to grow in 2010,” they wrote.
German, Dutch, Gains
Natural-gas volumes bought and sold in the U.K. in 2009 amounted to 16,684 terawatt-hours, a gain of 4 percent from the previous year. German activity rose 134 percent to 955 terawatt- hours, while the Netherlands, the second-biggest traded market after the U.K., gained 23 percent to 2,680 terawatt-hours, according to the report.
The commodity’s churn-rate, or the number of times a country’s consumption volume is traded, was 6.6 in the Netherlands, 3.7 in Belgium and 1.1 in Germany.
European natural-gas consumption slumped 6.3 percent last year from 2008, as factories used less of the fuel during the worst recession since World War II, Prospex said.
Global trade in natural gas increased 7.7 percent last year, BP Plc said June 9 in its annual Statistical Review of World Energy.
Global trade in liquefied natural gas grew 7.6 percent in 2009, bolstered by rising exports from Qatar and Russia, even as the recession squeezed worldwide gas use, BP said.
Prospex Research gathers data from official statistics, exchange volumes and estimates from brokers and trading companies to compile the reports. The European Gas Trading 2010 report is published tomorrow.
To contact the reporters on this story: Lars Paulsson in London at lpaulsson@bloomberg.net
To contact the editor responsible for this story: Stephen Voss at sev@bloomberg.net
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