Reasons and countermeasures for the seasonal gas shortage in 2017

Abstract

Studying the formation process of seasonal gas shortage in the winter of 2017 is of great significance to understand the current marketization situations of natural gas industry in China and promote its steady development. In this paper, the evolution process and severity of gas shortage in the winter of 2017 were analyzed based on a large amount of data. Then, the reasons for the gas shortage were studied systematically in the framework of natural gas supply and demand based on the previous research results, and the corresponding countermeasures were put forward. It is shown that the seasonal gas shortage in 2017 began to take shape in September, occurred initially in October, broke out intensively in November, developed continuously in December and eventually evolved into gas shortage all over the country. And its severity is embodied as a huge gas supply gap, a wide range of affected areas, a significant LNG price rise and so on. It is indicated that the reason for the seasonal gas shortage is that the increase of natural gas demand caused by the economic recovery and that the coal-to-gas conversion exceeds the increase of domestic and foreign natural gas supply under the constraint of production, transportation and storage capacity. And the corresponding countermeasures were put forward as follows. First, the fundamental way to solve the seasonal gas shortage is to promote the market-oriented reform of natural gas industry orderly by coordinating the upstream and the downstream with the midstream as the breakthrough point. Second, the opening of old pipe networks should be promoted and the new pipe networks should be constructed orderly, such as tie-lines, core pipeline networks and regional pipeline networks. Third, the impacts of economic fluctuations and coal-to-gas conversion should be alleviated and supply capacity should be strengthened. Fourth, some other measures are also helpful to solving gas shortage like accommodating the peak gas demand by means of seasonal price difference and peak-valley price difference,abolishing cross subsidy to promote gas price merging, making the regional emergency peak shaving plan and constructing regional markets,etc. In conclusion, the natural gas supply and demand is expected to be improved in 2018, but the situation is still not optimistic.