Gas exporters plan partnership

DOHA, Qatar — The world's largest natural gas exporting countries plan to establish a high-level group on gas pricing, the Russian energy minister said Monday, though his Iranian and Qatari counterparts denied the producers aim to establish a cartel.

Europe and the United States have expressed worries that the gas exporters seek to establish a cartel along the lines of OPEC that would control production levels and pricing. Faced with the concerns, leading producers Iran and Russia have backed off talk of doing so at Monday's gathering here of the 16-member Gas Producing Countries Forum.

But Russian Industry and Energy Minister Viktor Khristenko said Monday the forum would create a group to look into pricing. "Russia is ready to be the one that will carry out research into the problem of price formation for gas," Khristenko said, according to the Russian Interfax news agency.

He did not say how such a group's operations would differ from those of a cartel, but Jonathan Stern, director of gas research at the Oxford Institute for Energy Studies, said Russia was genuinely interested in reviewing the way gas prices are calculated, rather than creating a formal price-fixing cartel.

"It makes sense for gas exporters to re-examine why the price of gas is linked to oil prices," Stern said. Gas prices in long-term European contracts are currently tied to oil prices.

Earlier Monday, energy ministers from Iran and Qatar denied that the talks were aimed at creating a gas cartel modeled on the OPEC oil exporters' group.

Iran's Minister of Petroleum Seyed Hamaneh and his Qatari counterpart, Abdullah al-Attiyah, said discussions aimed to create a stable world market for the fuel.

"I hate the name cartel. We are not a cartel," al-Attiyah told reporters on the sidelines of the meeting's opening ceremony. "We're just here to consider our interests."

Hamaneh added that "there is no discussion in this meeting about a cartel. The cartel is not an issue. We're here to exchange views on technical issues and on the markets."

Al-Attiyah invited natural gas importers to discuss these issues with the exporters, rather than protesting the two-day meeting in Doha and talking about possibly imposing new taxes and regulations.

"The West is reacting negatively," al-Attiyah said. "They should sit with us and discuss this with us before imposing any regulations on us or any new taxes."