European natural gas infrastructure: The impact of market developments on gas flows and physical market integration

Increasing European natural gas import dependency and risks of natural gas supply disruptions support the need for additional natural gas infrastructure. Demand developments and major import pipeline commissionings have a major impact on the level of market integration and the secure supply of final consumers. We analyze a variety of scenarios with a highly granulated European natural gas infrastructure model to analyze gas flows and identify where and when congestions occur in the European natural gas transmission network. In addition to daily and scenario specific demand variations, major pipeline scenarios are analyzed for 2019 as well as an LNG glut scenario. Based on the assumptions of planned intra-European interconnector projects being implemented by that time, we find that the level of market integration is high especially in Western Europe, except for a bottleneck between Denmark and Germany, and some countries in Eastern Europe.