Asia will become the second-largest global natural gas market after North America by 2015 with annual demand rising to 790 billion cubic meters, the International Energy Agency said in a report released Tuesday.
“Asia is already home to the world’s fastest-growing gas market. But expanding the role of gas in Asia will depend on regional market conditions that allow the fuel to compete autonomously in local energy markets that are themselves connected to global energy markets,” IEA Executive Director Maria van der Hoeven told a conference in Tokyo sponsored by the Institute of Energy Economics, Japan.
“The future role of gas in Asia will depend considerably on how the pricing of natural gas is tied to the fundamentals of supply and demand in the region,” Van der Hoeven said.
It will be “dominated by long-term contracts in which the price of gas is linked, or indexed, to that of oil,” the report said.
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