European Natural Gas Infrastructure in the Energy Transition

In this paper, we focus on the development of European gas infrastructure in the energy transition with particular focus on the so-called Projects of Common Interest (PCIs). To this end, three models with different spatial-temporal resolutions and information structures have analyzed the European natural gas infrastructure developments over the period 2015-2050. We evaluate the gas market and infrastructure towards 2050, what additional infrastructure is needed and what is the socioeconomic value of planned PCI projects. We present endogenous capacity expansions based on three similar gas models and perform an ex-post analysis of PCI projects. Some PCI project are favoured by all analyses, whereas for others results are mixed or we find no support at all. We observe that the decarbonization goals do not need much investment on gas infrastructure, as the demand projections of PRIMES (both reference and EUCO30) are showing a decreasing gas demand, that can be served by the current infrastructure and a limited number of PCIs are needed despite the decreasing domestic production within the EU. The results are robust in this sense as three modelling tools using the same input data but different model structure and granularity delivered similar outputs.