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The natural gas market, after being declared as transitional energy source for achieving climate neutrality, has emerged from a decades-long shadow of oil. Natural gas consumption has a significant increase in consumption, because in addition to efficiency in environmental protection, it is increasingly used in many industries. The European natural gas market is still characterized by long-term contracts, which, together with reduced natural gas production in the EU and infrastructure-related supply routes that restrict competition, puts the largest natural gas exporting countries in a dominant position over the fragmented European market. The European Union is making significant efforts to liberalize the natural gas market by encouraging supply and demand of natural gas prices at a growing number of gas market hubs. By applying modern technologies for processing and transporting natural gas in liquid form, the limitation of the availability of natural gas exclusively to areas where is a built pipeline network has been significantly reduced. The construction of LNG terminals intensified trade on the world market, which affected the general decline in natural gas prices. The outbreak of the COVID-19 virus pandemic and the Russian invasion of Ukraine created unexpected disruptions in the world natural gas market, and even the biggest energy experts do not want to predict what awaits us in the coming months and years. Energy transition will not only require high costs of investment in new forms of energy, but also high cost functionality of the fossil fuel market in the period. Due to the geopolitical crisis, the realization of the single European gas market has faced its greatest challenges. The decline in demand for natural gas in 2020 with historically low prices was replaced in less than a year by unexpectedly high demand with high price growth. The governments of all affected countries, including the Government of the Republic of Croatia, are in a hurry to define a package of measures to mitigate the impending impact of natural gas prices, but the full implementation of natural gas market liberalization in Croatia requires entrepreneurs to know market players and market rules in the gas sector, monitor movements on world stock exchanges, in order to prevent the negative effects of disturbances on the world natural gas market and ensure the best possible procurement conditions. This paper presents the basic components of the natural gas market in the European Union and Croatia and the legal and contractual rules that affect the formation of the natural gas price currently paid by entrepreneurs as well as the expected movement of the natural gas price. |
