No Asian gas hub imminent: Osaka Gas

Lack of fully liberalised East Asian downstream sectors and growing linkage to European prices slow progress towards a stand-alone regional gas market

The development of a fully liquid traded gas hub in East Asia remains unlikely in the near future, an analyst at Japanese utility Osaka Gas told the European Annual Gas Conference in Paris on Tuesday.  Physical spot LNG trading and paper trade in futures contracts settling against the JKM index provided by price reporting agency S&P Global Platts continues to grow. But factors particular to East Asian countries’ gas markets, as well as an increasing benchmark role for the European TTF reference price in Asia, continue to hamper the development of a truly Asian gas-on-gas competitive traded market.  While it would be beneficial to have a pipeline gas and LNG hub in Asia, “to create a tran