Such is his commitment to breaking the old system that BHP has recently been testing indexed prices by selling iron ore on spot markets at well below contract prices.
Open image in new window Fig. 4 Indexed price development (NOK/km) Open image in new window Fig. 5 Kilometres driven per passenger, Oppland county.
Looking at data from the neighbouring county of Oppland, two clear observations can be drawn: First, the indexed price development of the different market segments (Fig. 4), and, second, the development in kilometres driven per passenger (Fig. 5).
The EU European Unionn) probe is focused on the indexed prices formulated and published by such agencies as Platts.
The most recent set of talks broke up because China will not pay Asian oil-indexed prices, as Russia demands, or even European oil-indexed prices.
In this way, it is natural and easy to set inflation-indexed prices, and Chile is much more effectively inflation-indexed than other countries are.
High oil-indexed prices threaten to cut Gazprom's market share, by encouraging the building of more LNG import terminals and the development of European shale gas.
"Decc's central gas price scenario assumes a re-linking of gas to oil-indexed prices in the short-term as the gas glut erodes," though "from 2017 the linkage begins to weakens significantly".
All this opened a big gap between the spot price and the oil-indexed price asked by Gazprom, Norway's Statoil and other big, state-run suppliers.Utilities and gas wholesalers, tied to long contracts, were undercut by unencumbered smaller rivals buying in the spot market.
Thomas Longford, a banker at UBS, which has been involved in sales of stakes in the Mozambique discoveries, said on Wednesday at the Oil and Money Conference in London that all of the gas was likely to be sold at premium oil-indexed prices.
