Aspetti tecnico-finanziari di TTF e Henry Hub

Wholesale natural gas pricing for European benchmark TTF futures contract takes place within the domain of a fully-structured commodity futures market. The notion according to which TTF futures prices reflect inherent technical inefficiencies of that market is ill-established. Far more valid reasons behind TTF futures prices wild run up are to be found in the massive contraction of natural gas physical supply flows from Russia from as far as spring 2021. The need to attract large quantities of LNG from international routes to replace lost Russian piped supplies makes the case for TTF prices to «compete via signal» against international buyers in direct competition with European ones. As such, the relevance of the TTF price formation mechanism has grown dramatically as Europe evolves from a (nearly) stand-alone regional hub to a regional hub in direct international competition.