The European hubs for natural gas: An integration towards a single area?

Regulators hope that competitive forces will be enough to create efficiency, and hence we see their persistent policy concerns about market structure, resource adequacy and regional interconnection. Facilitating the latter, in particular, through greater network interconnection capacities, and the harmonization of trading at various local hubs is going to be actively pursued in many parts of Europe with the aim of improving both market efficiency and system reliability. This paper seeks to advance our understanding of the efficiency of European gas spot prices by looking at several regional markets. We pursue this through an analysis of spot prices collected on the following markets: NBP, TTF, Zeebrugge, PSV and Baumgarten. Hence, this paper is going to investigate empirical properties of European Natural gas spot prices, which drives electricity prices across Europe. Furthermore here we propose to understand the state of integration of these markets toward a single European area as suggested by the European Commission and followed by ENTSO-G. Therefore applying Granger's causality tests and Vector Error Correction Models, we test the hypothesis of both short and long run integration process and try to understand which is the nature of interactions among such prices across the European area. © 2012 IEEE.