The Pricing Mechanism Analysis of China’s Natural Gas Supply Chain under the “Dual Carbon” Target Based on the Perspective of Game Theory

• Published in: Sustainability Vol. 14; no. 15; p. 9510
• Main Authors: Che, Cheng, Geng, Xin, Zheng, Huixian, Chen, Yi, Zhang, Xiaoguang
• Format: Journal Article
• Language: English
• Published: Basel MDPI AG 01.08.2022
• Subjects: Carbon; Clean technology; Coal; Consumers; Energy consumption; Energy industry; Environmental impact; Industrialized nations; Infrastructure; Natural gas industry; Natural gas prices; Supply chains; United States > US; China; Japan
• ISSN: 2071-1050; 2071-1050
• DOI: 10.3390/su14159510

China is currently the world’s largest energy consumer and carbon emitter. In order to reduce the harm of carbon dioxide to the global ecological environment, the use of natural gas instead of coal is a realistic choice for China to achieve the “dual carbon” goal. Opportunities also bring new challenges, and the price of natural gas is an important method of promoting the upstream and downstream industrial chains of natural gas, so it is of great practical significance to study the price of natural gas. This paper builds a three-level supply chain model consisting of suppliers in the natural gas market, city gas companies and consumers in the market and uses the Stackelberg game to study the decision-making models of different subjects under their own dominance and centralized decision-making; it also considers the pricing mechanism and profit situation of stakeholders in the natural gas market under the low-carbon preference of consumers and the level of corporate carbon emission reduction. The research results show that when considering consumers’ low-carbon preferences, the sales prices of various stakeholders in the market have increased, which is beneficial for all entities in the natural gas industry chain. At the same time, with the low-carbon transformation of energy companies, the production method drives the price of raw materials to rise in the process of low-carbon innovation, which, in turn, makes the price of various stakeholders in the natural gas market and the level of carbon emission reduction per unit show a positive relationship; in order to maximize the overall profit of the supply chain, the natural gas market should adopt a centralized decision-making method to further promote the reform of China’s natural gas marketization.