Study of the impacts of upstream natural gas market reform in China on infrastructure deployment and social welfare using an SVM-based rolling horizon stochastic game analysis

Abstract Natural gas is expected to play a much more important role in China in future decades, and market reform is crucial for its rapid market penetration. At present, the main gas fields, pipelines and liquefied natural gas (LNG) infrastructure are mainly monopolized by large state-owned companies, and one of the important market reform policies is to open up LNG import rights to smaller private companies and traders. Therefore, in the present study, a game theoretical model is proposed to analyze and compare the impacts of different market structures on infrastructure deployment and social welfare. Moreover, a support vector machine-based rolling horizon stochastic method is adopted in the model to simulate real LNG price fluctuations. Four market reform scenarios are proposed considering different policies such as business separation, third-party access (TPA) and their combinations. The results indicate that, with third-party access (TPA) entrance into the LNG market, the construction of LNG infrastructure will be promoted and more gas will be provided at lower prices, and thus the total social welfare will be improved greatly