Research On Domestic And Overseas Natural Gas Price Formation Mechanism

After the second oil crisis, many countries have realized the importance of diversification of energy sources and the world energy structure have gradually transited to complementary competitive era, mixing of oil, coal, natural gas and nuclear. Natural gas is in the proportion of expanding in the primary energy consumption structure in the world because of its high quality, efficient and clean characteristics, some people even said that the 21st century is the century of natural gas. China is gradually entering the period of great development of natural gas, but the poor current gas price formation mechanism have led to no advantage of price even high quality resources and affected the further development of natural gas of our country.China's natural gas price formation mechanism has significant monopoly character, the government plays a leading role in pricing and implements of sub-management of natural gas pricing, which means the gas prices are divided into wellhead price, pipeline transportation price and distribution price. The main pricing methodology is cost-plus pricing method, supplemented by agreement price, pay with no bargaining and oil price indexation methods. Meanwhile the import price of LNG (Liquefied Natural Gas) refers to the foreign pricing. This pricing approach leads to lack of market sensitivity to gas prices, unreasonable profit distribution of gas industry chain, low prices compared with alternative resources, finally resulting in excessive demand and even a wide range of gas shortage. Overseas experience shows that natural gas pricing mechanism must gradually move towards the competitive market from monopoly by means of bringing into the third party so as to achieve optimal allocation of resources via gas-on-gas competition.The first part of this paper, combining the resource feature of natural gas and its industrial property feature, analyzed the impact factors of natural gas prices, introduced the general theory of natural gas pricing mechanism and international current six natural gas pricing methods, and researched discussions of domestic scholars on China's current natural gas price formation mechanism. Then, it introduced natural gas pricing practices of the four major international natural gas regional markets: North America, Europe Union, Russia and the Asia-Pacific Region, analyzed natural gas price formation mechanism choices of the natural gas industry in different development stages and different resource endowments and studied the general laws and rules of the gas prices formation mechanism. Thirdly, it made an analysis of the main problems in the current domestic gas pricing, combining features of natural gas, the industry stage of development and historical evolution of natural gas pricing in our country, and gave some advices and measures in order to smooth the pricing mechanism of natural gas, including developing competitive markets, gradually introducing netback from final product and expanding oil price indexation, so as to give references to the reform of natural gas pricing.