Natural gas two-fer, Gazprom and TransCanada

According to the U.K.'s Telegraph, Russian natural gas giant, Gazprom, has no plans to abandon its practice of tying prices for its gas to oil prices even after going through a crisis recently where very low European spot prices undercut that model. The company is sticking with its coupled price structure because it says the spot market cannot yet guarantee a long-term, stable supply of gas. Also, in an effort to reduce its reliance on European markets, the company plans to aggressively pursue markets in the Asian Far East. Near its end, the report gives a brief run-down of Gazprom's plans to ramp up supply for Asia and the Pacific coast of North America, primarily focusing on liquefied natural gas from its Sakhalin II LNG plant in eastern Siberia, and its plans to build gas pipelines to China, Japan and South Korea. Read much more, here.

In North American gas news, according to Canada's Globe and Mail, TransCanada is in the middle of negotiations to decrease the cost of shipping natural gas across Canada, but to do that, it proposes to raise transportation costs in the western part of the country. The plan is attracting scorn from the Alberta gas producers who would be most affected, most prominently EnCana Corp. The Canadian Mainline, the pipeline at the center of negotiations, has suffered from precipitous reductions in flow recently, due mainly to shale-gas-induced price drops and subsequent production decreases. With production dropping, the gas costs more to ship, and TransCanada last year raised tolls on the line by 38 percent. That decision was criticised for possibly creating a "death spiral" by driving even more gas away and jeopardizing the pipeline itself -- hence the new proposal. TransCanada CEO Russ Girling told the Globe and Mail, "We need to bring our [Mainline] tolls down and there’s various methods by which we can do that. We need to move our costs from those places where we’re not moving as much gas to those places where we are.” Read much more, here.