Removing Cross-Border Capacity Bottlenecks in the European Natural Gas Market: A Proposed Merchant-Regulatory Mechanism

We propose a merchant-regulatory framework to promote investment in the European natural-gas network infrastructure based on a price cap over two-part tariffs. As suggested by Vogelsang (2001) and Hogan et al., (2010), a profit maximizing network operator (NO) facing this regulatory constraint will intertemporally rebalance the variable and fixed part of its two-part tariff so as to expand the congested pipelines, and converge to the Ramsey-Boiteaux equilibrium. We confirm this with actual data from the European natural gas market by comparing the bi-level price-cap model with a base case, a no-regulation case, and a welfare benchmark, and performing various sensitivity analyses. In all cases, the incentive model is the best decentralized regulatory alternative to efficiently develop the entire pipeline system in Europe.