It's a huge opportunity for aggressive energy companies to compete, buying cheap gas in Britain for export to the Continent. It will not only cause a commercial headache for incumbents, such as GdF, which are tied to expensive, long-term contracts to buy Russian gas, but also a political problem, as the French Government will come under intense pressure to deliver cheaper energy to consumers.

Cheaper is surely a challenge, but cheaper than ther UK?

Unprivatised, monopolistic, sluggish GdF is a political accident waiting to happen. Without a merger, it can only become a whipping boy for angry regulators and consumers.

It is privatised, it is not monopolistic (just dominant because, precisely, it is competitive thanks to its long term supply contracts - the same long term contracts that made the Norwegian pipeline possible - and its focus on infrastructure - a competence it is now bringing to the UK market, by the way).

This report by Poyry (pdf), a well known market consultant, suggests that the future is quite hard to predict - they have several radically different scenarios for the future

Excess capacity (and note that import capacity is not quite the same thing as supply as the winter last year showed with little supply coming via the interconnector from the continent despite the record prices in the UK, and as the future is likely to show when the US and Spain will offer to pay more for LNG to ensure supply).

So, with a nice underlying hypothesis of steady oil prices at 50$/bl, you get massively variable price scenarios for the next 5 years.

But the UK market is just so superior to what's done on the continent.