The review of the year and the outlook for the new year is a tradition in the first issue of ener|gate Gasmarkt every year – a tradition that will remain in place.
I do not know whether anyone will, in a few years, proudly say: “I was part of it”. The whole market situation is increasingly becoming a nightmare for everyone. The development of gas trading prices and price volatility in 2021 is unprecedented. The graph of the year is shown in Figure 1. It shows the soaring prices and the considerable backwardation along the curve (Cal 23), but not the often strange intra-day volatility.
However, "review" is not quite the right word for looking at the market madness – we are still in the middle of it, as the days since mid-December have made clear. For the 2022 outlook, a very clear crystal ball would allow me to predict whether and when the current mayhem will end. Today, the best guess seems to be that it will presumably last much longer than this winter. One reason is the uncertainty regarding future Russian gas supplies and Gazprom’s utilisation of its west European storage capacity. This is, of course, related to the still pending Nord Stream 2 certification, but also depends on the future political relations with Russia and the relations to Russia as a gas supplier. Hopefully, 2022 will not end with the following conclusion: It was as painful as 2021. The current tensions with Russia due the concentration of troops at its western border are frightening. At the beginning of December, I moderated a web talk organised by E-World about the 2021 price turbulences...
