The article presents the results of the study of the current state and prospects of development of the European gas market in connection with the economic assessment of Severgazprom pipeline system development project. The relevance of the study is predetermined by the ever-increasing role of Severgazprom transport infrastructure in natural gas exports to Europe, as well as the integration processes within the Russian and Pan-European gas systems. The analysis of the problems and prospects of formation and development of the Pan-European gas market and the current state of the gas market in Europe, its structure, basic principles and nature of functioning allowed to identify the main factors for increasing the competitiveness of the Russian gas industry in the European market and the main trends of its development.
One of the most important problems of financial planning in oil companies is a significant dependence of future investment opportunities of the company on its current investment decisions. The economic efficiency of current capital investments is connected with the estimation of future cash flows, not always reliable. In this regard, the key element of the company's investment portfolio management system becomes the formation of a financial budget that takes into account all the unique features and optional characteristics of specific projects. Formation of the financial budget based on the net present value may not be quite adequate, since this indicator does not take into account some of the optional characteristics of projects (managerial flexibility, emerging synergies, etc.), and therefore does not reflect the real value of a particular project. In this connection, the possibility of using the theory of option pricing for the economic assessment of the cost of “strategic” projects with option characteristics seems relevant. The theory of option pricing expands the existing analytical tools, allows to reveal hidden reserves of projects cost and to form the optimal financial budget of the company.
