AGH managing director-cum-CEO Faris Mustaffa said the digital gas marketplace would make the trading of the commodity in Malaysia more effective and transparent.

“We believe Malaysia has the potential to become an excellent market, compared with the US and Europe. We provide solutions to make the energy market more efficient and effective,” he said.

Faris said AGH would focus on digitalisation and increasing awareness of the local market and make market data more readily available.

He told Bernama that AGH was also in talks with 17 local players with shipping licences to trade on the platform to enable buyers to own and transport gas to Malaysia.

AGH will also develop another digital system called LNGX to manage and reduce the importation of LNG which is expected to be launched in the first quarter of 2024.

Faris said that among the challenges in the LNG market are the high cost of imports and low consumption. He said the new platform would enable foreign players to participate in the system to trade LNG.

He said that with GasX and LNGX in place, the Malaysian market would become more accessible to foreign suppliers and local suppliers would be able to import LNG and trade on GasX.

The plan for the digitalised marketplace was first announced in June last year after AGH signed a memorandum of understanding (MoU) with Universiti Teknologi Petronas (UTP) for technology development for the digital marketplace.

Prior to that, AGH signed an MoU with Bursa Malaysia Derivatives Bhd to study the feasibility of establishing natural gas futures contracts that could be traded on an exchange.

AGH and Comet recently announced that the energy trading platform’s newest technology, CG Hub, has been selected to power AGH’s GasX launch in June.

As part of a larger overall strategy to open up the natural gas market in Malaysia, AGH will implement a customised version of CG Hub to serve as the marketplace for buyers and sellers to post, negotiate and execute transactions for domestic natural gas.