A Top-Down Approach to Evaluating Cross-Border Natural Gas Infrastructure Projects in Europe

There is an ongoing policy debate in Europe about how to select natural gas infrastructure projects for an EU-wide investment support scheme. We contribute to this debate by introducing a model-based project evaluation method that addresses several shortcomings of the current approach and demonstrate its application on a set of shortlisted investment proposals in Central and South Eastern Europe. Importantly, our selection mechanism deals with the complementarity and the substitutability of new pipelines. We find that a small number of projects are sufficient to maximize the net gain in regional welfare, but different baseline assumptions favor different project combinations. We also explore the consequences of Russian gas permanently delivered at the EU border from northern and southern routes that bypass Ukraine and find modest negative welfare effects.