Under the AGP initiative, USEA, ICF and USAID’s South Asia Regional Energy Hub (SAREH) held webinar on “Creating Traded and Competitive Gas Markets in Asia – Prerequisites” on December 3rd, 2020..  The webinar aims to provide insights on how the gas markets have evolved in the South East Asian countries over the past few years. Through a panel discussion, the esteemed panelists will discuss the best practices and recommendations for creating traded and competitive gas markets in these countries with focus on India, Singapore, Bangladesh, Thailand, Philippines, and Indonesia.

At present, wholesale gas markets in the Asia Pacific region are largely underdeveloped and do not seem to provide a foundation for development of market hubs within the individual countries due to various reasons like underdeveloped infrastructure, government control on gas allocation and pricing, third party access to pipelines and terminals.

LNG is the dominant supply for natural gas in the Asia Pacific region. The national gas markets in Asia Pacific are in early stages of liberalization with Singapore as an exception with its fully deregulated gas market. Despite being one of the major natural gas consuming region, the Asia Pacific region lacks a liquid transparent LNG pricing benchmark such as Henry Hub in the United States or the National Balancing Point in the United Kingdom.