Natural gas industry chain analysis

The natural gas industry is a capital-intensive industry with uneven distribution of resources, large investment scale of pipeline facilities, and strict policy control, which makes it difficult for private enterprises to participate in the industry. The marketization degree of some links in the industry is low, the product price cannot fully reflect its value in the market, and even the annual profit of some links is inverted. Therefore, it will analyze the operation mode, pricing policy and main status quo of each link from top to bottom of the industrial chain. In order to highlight the characteristics of the flow and pricing of different phases of natural gas products in the industrial chain, this paper elaborates on the gas chain.

Second, gaseous natural gas source

1. Natural gas exploitation

(1) There are few participating enterprises in the mining link and strong monopoly

China implements a strict qualification examination and approval system for the exploitation of natural gas, and the relevant competent departments authorized by The State Council shall examine and approve and issue licenses for the exploration and exploitation of specific minerals such as oil and natural gas. Although China has successively issued policies to encourage and support private capital to enter the field of oil and gas exploration and development, the relevant legislation has not been amended, and the factors such as high exploration and exploitation cost and long cycle have been added. Up to now, private enterprise capital has rarely obtained oil and gas mining rights alone. Therefore, China's natural gas mining links have the characteristics of few participating enterprises and strong monopoly. At present, the main entities with natural gas exploration and exploitation qualifications are three barrels of oil and four Yanchang oil companies. Among them, CNPC and Sinopec are mainly responsible for land oil exploration and development, and their registered exploration rights account for about 40% of the country, and the mining rights account for about 80% of the country, totaling more than 1.7 million square kilometers, with oligopolistic advantages. Cnooc focuses on offshore oil exploration and development; Yanchang Petroleum has the right to explore and develop oil and gas resources in a specific area.

(2) The operation mode of the mining link is simple, but the capital and technology needs are high

The operation mode of natural gas mining is relatively simple, and the mining body needs to export the mineral resources after exploration and development, collection and purification through backbone pipelines, and partly convert into LNG and transport to the consumption end by tanker, but it has high requirements on the scale of capital investment and mining technology. Among them, natural gas exploration and development is mainly seismic exploration (exploring the underlying form, structural characteristics, oil and water features and other information), which is usually carried out at the same time as crude oil exploration, so the overall exploration and development expenditure is large. In 2015, when the oil price plummeted, CNOOC reduced the exploration and development expenditure by 30% of the capital expenditure. At the same time, affected by the high scale of capital investment in the early stage of oil and gas resources exploitation, the domestic enterprises participating in this link are large state-owned central enterprises with strong strength. In the recovery stage, the pure natural gas reservoir needs to inject other gases or liquids to squeeze out the natural gas, and the associated gas with crude oil needs to be separated in this stage. There are also differences in the cost of drilling under different gas reservoir conditions, but with the lengthening of the production period of gas reservoir, the production cost generally declines first and then increases. Therefore, the production technology is the main factor to reduce the cost. The technical barriers of late purification are low, mainly for the removal of impurities such as water, water vapor, sulfide and carbon dioxide in natural gas. On the whole, the process involved in mining is relatively complicated and the business model is relatively simple, but the exploration and development process requires a large amount of capital investment, and the importance of continuous recovery technology is highlighted with the harvest period. Due to the time and capital investment required before the exploitation of self-owned gas reservoirs, it is difficult to achieve a large increase in the scale of self-produced gas in the short term. Therefore, with the rapid increase of natural gas consumption, the growth rate of self-produced gas exploitation is lower than the growth rate of consumption, and the proportion of self-produced gas in China's gas source structure has declined year by year, and the proportion has dropped to 60% at the end of 2017, and the proportion will further decline in the future.

(3) The ex-factory price has changed from the main regulated price to the indirect regulated price