Natural gas has certain advantages that support its penetration in the energy market and so that more and more people are attracted to using natural gas rather than other sources of energy. The main advantages related to the fact that burning natural gas generates much lower emissions than burning other fossil fuels, and is notably than burning coal. So gas and coal frequently compete with each other especially in power generation. When you burn coal, you generate twice as many CO2 emissions into the atmosphere as when you burn gas. So given the energy content that you need, if you obtain this energy content out of gas, this is much more benign for the environment. Shifting from coal to gas is one simple way to quickly reduce greenhouse gas emissions. Another obvious advantage of gas is that, it has a clean flame and this is very important in certain industrial processes, where you need to avoid any impurity and other sources of heat may instead generate such impurities. So when we are talking about, for example, the production of glass or the production of silicon or the molding of some plastics, you want to have a very clean flame and also some cases directional flame, gas you can direct it to a specific point of the product. So this is important in industrial processes. Another point is that, gas is available from the network, so this is very convenient especially for small and medium enterprises because they don't need to maintain a reservoir for crude oil or storage for coal, and they can simply turn the tap and they will get gas from the pipeline. Another extremely important point that I need to mention is that gases allows for power generation much more efficiently than other sources because in a thermal power plant which burns oil or coal or even nuclear, the efficiency of the transformation is low. You have at most 40, 45 percent efficiency in the transformation which means that, only 40, 45 percent of the energy originally contained in the fossil fuel that you are burning is transformed into electricity, the rest is lost in the transformation. For gas, the efficiency can be much higher up to 60, 65 percent efficiency, which means that you very much reduce the amount of waste of energy and you get more electricity out of the same energy that you have utilized at the beginning. The drawback of gas is that it has low energy density, so it is not a good store of energy. Per unit of volume, it contains little energy and it cannot be easily transported. That difficulty of transporting gas is the most important consideration when it comes to the economics of gas. Because gas is difficult to transport, in order to be able to use it, you need a network. It's basically impossible to serve a customer and take gas to a market unless there is a network. You need a network of pipelines that run across the streets in an urban center and even reached individual homes, and even pass through the walls of the home to reach the kitchen, to reach the boiler, to reach the water heater. You need to have this network and this facility in order to have a market for gas. So in some major cities, such networks were established already at the end of the 19th century or at the beginning of the 20th century, and there have been progressively enlarged. So in cities where networks were established a long time ago, it is easy to enlarge the networks and the market for gas will exist. But in some cities, such networks have never been established. To establish them from scratch is a very challenging proposition, almost never happens. That is because you literally would need to carve up old streets, to lay pipes in the streets, you would need to convince homeowners to have pipeline pipes running through their walls and so on. This is not a practical proposition. So in fact, where networks are not available, gas does not have an easy market. In the original networks in the 19th century and the first part of the 20th century, we're fed with gas that was manufactured. It was produced out of coal. You would have a gas factory in each major urban center. This gas factory would produce the gas that is injected in the urban network. With the advent of methane when we discovered significant sources of natural gas, then natural gas was taken to the existing network and it substituted for manufactured gas. Today, manufactured gas is basically used nowhere. But it's important that we call it natural gas. Why do we call it natural gas? Because it is in contraposition with what we had in the past, manufactured gas. In countries where urban networks have existed, so there is a market for gas and it is possible therefore to sell gas and import gas because you have an established market. Residential demand is important, so it is important to reach each individual household. It is also the premium market for the gas. It's the market that will pay the higher price because, it's very convenient to have gas in homes. So it is the backbone of the gas industry in all countries where gas is utilized. In contrast, in countries where residential demand did not develop historically, gas penetration has remained low. It is essentially tied to power generation because power plants are large potential consumers, so it may be acceptable, economically convenient to take gas to a large power plant and then distribute the electricity. Because of the high cost of transportation, gas is preferably consumed locally. There is less use flexibility and higher transportation costs for gas, and therefore, the value of gas at the well head is much lower than the value of oil. Whenever you can, you prefer to export oil and keep gas for domestic uses. So oil and gas producing countries will generally target domestic consumption with gas and maximize the export of oil. The countries that have the highest gas penetration are those which either still have significant domestic production of gas or at least in the past, enjoyed significant domestic production of gas. On the basis of that, have been able to develop local networks and now those networks exist, and when domestic production declines, then you start importing from the rest of the world but the market is established. If the market is not established, it's very difficult to start importing from the rest of the world. So when we look at the level of consumption and dependency on natural gas at the European level, as you can see in this slide, there is a lot of difference in between individual European countries. We have some countries that are still today or have been in the past large gas producers and their gas accounts for a very significant share of total energy consumption. So when we speak of the Netherlands, Hungary, Italy, Romania or the United Kingdom, we are talking about countries, especially the first three, have a level of gas penetration which is close to 40 percent of total energy consumption. So these are countries that are substantially relying on gas as a source of energy. In contrast, when you move towards the right side, right end of the chart, you find countries where gas plays a much smaller role or even almost non-existent role such as the case of Sweden. But there are more, even an important country like Poland, is only 15 percent dependent of gas. The same is true for Bulgaria, Greece or Finland. These are all countries where gas plays a very limited role and has never succeeded in penetrating the market in any significant way.
