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European Natural-Gas Trading Rose 11% Last Year (Update1)
2010-09-30 09:41:55.521 GMT
(Adds churn-rate estimates in sixth paragraph.)
By Lars Paulsson
Sept. 30 (Bloomberg) -- 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.
For Related News and Information:
European gas-market stories TNI EUROPE GASMARKET <GO>
Today's top gas news GTOP <GO> and energy news ETOP <GO>
European Energy Brokers Page NRGB <GO>
--Editors: Bruce Stanley, Raj Rajendran
To contact the reporters on this story:
Lars Paulsson in London at +44-207-673-2759 or
lpaulsson@bloomberg.net
To contact the editor responsible for this story:
Stephen Voss at +44 207 7073 3520 or sev@bloomberg.net
