The United States is also seeing an increase in energy prices but is largely shielded because of gas production from its shale fields. Trade on the spot market is behind the surge in natural gas prices in Europe, a Kremlin spokesman said on Wednesday, reiterating that Russian state energy giant Gazprom is sticking to its contractual obligations in full. The Kremlin spokesman, Dmitry Peskov, dismissed allegations that Moscow could be partly blamed for soaring gas bills in Europe.
Russian gas giant Gazprom has been unwilling to shift the gas price-making mechanism to the spot market, preferring long-term gas contracts, once its backbone of gas sales to Europe. Khan told Deese she also was concerned that the FTC's approach to merger reviews in recent years had "enabled" significant consolidation in the industry and created "conditions ripe for price coordination and other collusive practices.
To tackle the issue, Khan said the FTC would "identify additional legal theories" to challenge mergers in which dominant players in the industry were buying up family-run businesses. She said the commission would also study its policies that require divestitures during mergers of gas stations in overlapping markets to ensure that was not encouraging further consolidation and anticompetitive behavior.
However, when pressured further, the representative did not want to go into detail. On Friday, Yara, the second-biggest producer of fertiliser globally, and with large production bases in the EU, announced it would reduce its ammonia production by 40 percent due to the current high gas prices. Ammonia is used to produce ammonium nitrate, which is a widely-used fertiliser.
Commission vice president Frans Timmermans was critical of this plan: "You can't just do that," he said on Wednesday. But according to the think tank Bruegel, major gas-price increases do pose a problem for European countries. Higher prices affect low-income households and member states disproportionately. According to Eurostat, 30 percent of people in Bulgaria cannot afford to keep their house warm. In total, 34m people suffer from what is called 'energy poverty. While temporary measures like direct payments to citizens can help cushion the effects of the current high prices, Bruegel says that European leaders can avoid future prices hikes structurally - by committing to renewable energy.
EU energy commissioner Kadri Simson also mentioned renewable energy as a way to stabilise prices. But Bruegel writes that governments have not yet committed enough to green energy: "Clearer commitments from governments will imply growing electricity demand.
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