Gas Exporting Countries Forum

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The Gas Exporting Countries Forum (GECF) is an organization of world's leading gas producers, which was established in Tehran in 2001. The aims of the GECF are:

to foster the concept of mutuality of interests by favouring dialogue between producers, between producers and consumers and between governments and energy-related industries;
to provide a platform to promote study and exchange of views;
to promote a stable and transparent energy market.

The GECF has no official statute or charter.

1 Membership
2 Ministerial meetings
3 Gas OPEC
4 References and notes
5 External links

[edit] Membership

The forum doesn't have fixed membership structure, however Algeria, Bolivia, Brunei, Egypt, Equatorial Guinea, Indonesia, Iran, Libya, Malaysia, Nigeria, Oman, Qatar, Russia, Trinidad & Tobago, the UAE and Venezuela could be identified as current members. Turkmenistan, Bolivia, Indonesia, Libya and Oman have participated at different ministerial meetings. Norway has status of observer.

[edit] Ministerial meetings

GECF has had 6 Ministerial meetings

Meeting		Year
Tehran		2001
Algiers		2002
Doha		2003
Cairo		2004
Port of Spain		2005
Doha		2006

The 6th Ministerial Meeting was scheduled to take a place in 2006 in Caracas, Venezuela but has met instead in Doha on September 18, 2006.

[edit] Gas OPEC

Since the establishment of GECF in 2001, there has always been speculations, particularly in Europe, whether the world's largest producers of natural gas, in particular Russia and Iran, plan to create a gas cartel equivalent to the OPEC which sets quotas and prices. The idea of a gas OPEC was first floated by Russian President Vladimir Putin and backed by Kazakh President Nursultan Nazarbaev in 2002. In May 2006 Gazprom deputy chairman Alexander Medvedev threatened that Russia would create "an alliance of gas suppliers that will be more influential than OPEC" if Russia did not get its way in energy negotiations with Europe.^[1] Iranian officials have explicitly expressed strong backing for a gas cartel and hold official talks with Russia.^[2]^[3] However, given the insecurity of European gas supplies from Russia, Putin has no option but to downplay the prospects of such cartel at this time.In addition formation of a Gas OPEC is problematic for three reasons firstly gas is far better distributed than oil,secondly the spot market for gas is non existent as you cannot store liquefied gas cost effectively and lastly you cannot have surplus capacity which you can tap on demand as some OPEC countries like Saudi Arabia have to act as a buffer to control prices.^{[citation needed]} The overwhelmingly large percentage of gas is supplied via pipelines which physically lock in consumer and producer.