RBTH: Russia may lose interest in AsPac gas market

The Asia Pacific governments have expressed serious concerns about stubbornly high gas prices in the region; some of them want to emulate European market regulation. 

Last Monday the Malaysian Prime Minister, Najib Razak, called for coordinated regulation of the Asian energy markets. Speaking at the Oil&Gas Asia 2013 conference in Kuala Lumpur, he said that the region was facing rapid and radical transformations in the oil and gas industry. 

This is the first time an Asian leader has called for joint regulation of the energy markets. 

The Asia Pacific countries are the world's largest consumers of liquefied natural gas (LNG). The prices they have to pay, however, are much higher than in Europe, says Valeriy Nesterov, an analyst with Sberbank Investment Research. It is therefore only natural for those countries to start thinking about creating a common, centrally regulated market. 

Russian experts doubt that the Asia Pacific governments will actually succeed at establishing a powerful regulatory agency. The say, however, that prices may yet fall in any event due to growing competition between the various suppliers, who have been diverting their strategies from the European market to Asia in recent years.  MORE