The Italian antitrust authority has opened a probe of Eni for having abused its dominant position in the international natural gas transportation market, the authority announced Friday on its website.
The probe was requested by Gas Intensive, a consortium of industrial gas buyers.
According to Gas Intensive, beginning in April 2011, Eni stopped auctioning some of its unutilized transportation capacity on the Transitgas and TAG pipelines -- which bring gas respectively from northern and eastern Europe -- thus affecting both supply and prices of gas to industrial customers.
According to pipeline operator Snam Rete Gas, on Thursday Italy imported from those two pipelines around 100 million cu meters of gas, roughly equivalent to half of all imports, while industrial demand that day was 44 million cu meters.
Gas Intensive negotiates and buys gas for consortium companies and directly manages the storage and shipping of gas. It said the missed auctions came at a time when the spread between prices on the Italian PSV gas market and those of other European gas markets was particularly favorable for Italian importers -- around Eur5/MWh ($6.60/MWh) -- and a new law had just assigned more storage capacity to industrial users.
Because of Eni's behavior, those users missed the opportunity to buy cheap gas in summer and stored it for later use, Gas Intensive alleged.
The antitrust authority said the probe would end by March 2013.
Eni declined comment on the matter.
Earlier this week, the regulator AEEG released its latest annual report on the state of the Italian gas market. It said "contractual congestion," under which a limited number of operators own transport capacity but don't use all of it, preventing other participants from using the network, was one of the main reasons why spot PSV prices were higher than their counterparts elsewhere in Europe.
The PSV day-ahead gas price was assessed by Platts at Eur29.80/MWh Thursday, compared with Eur24.15/MWh for the same period at TTF and Eur26.35/MWh at Baumgarten.
