Pricing energy spread options with variance gamma-driven Ornstein-Uhlenbeck dynamics

Abstract: We consider the pricing of energy spread options for spot prices following an exponential Ornstein-Uhlenbeck process driven by a sum of independent multivariate variance gamma processes. Within this class of mean-reverting, infinite activity price processes, the Esscher transform is used to obtain an equivalent martingale measure. We focus on the weak variance alpha-gamma process and show that it is not closed under the Esscher transform. By deriving an analytic expression for the cumulant generating function of the innovation term, we then obtain a pricing formula for forwards and apply the FFT method of Hurd and Zhou to price spread options. Lastly, we demonstrate how the model should be both estimated on energy prices under the real world measure and calibrated on forward or call prices, and provide numerical results for the pricing of spread options.