Transparency in any market is critical to its overall health and efficiency, enabling competition to benefit customers. Electronic trading and the reporting of certain natural gas commodity prices to index publishers is how natural gas markets maintain transparency and foster reliable price discovery.

During the past several years, the natural gas industry, index publishers and the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission (FERC) have worked together to come up with voluntary enhancements to the price-discovery process, to improve transparency and to further ensure market confidence.

This section reflects a compilation of some of the publicly available market activity trends from a number of natural gas index publishers and trading platforms. This page is updated frequently to provide a one-stop-repository for charts and developments. Click on the publisher/exchange's name to go to their site.

Platts

Note: Last updated Sept, 2008. Platts' monthly survey covered 70 pricing locations until Aug. 1, 2004, when seven typically inactive points were deleted. Tier counts do not include points for which no assessment is made in a month because of insufficient market information. Platts in 2003 began grouping pricing points in its monthly gas survey into three tiers: tier 1, volumes of at least 100,000 MMBtu/day and at least 10 trades; tier 2, volumes of 25,000 to 99,999 MMBtu/day and at least five trades; and tier 3, volumes below 25,000 MMBtu/day and/or fewer than five trades. As of August 2004, Platts publishes volumes and number of transactions for points in tiers 1 and 2.

For more information, contact Brian Jordan at (202) 383-2181.

Natural Gas Intelligence

Note: Last updated August, 2007. (1)In response to industry requests for more market price transparency, NGI began posting tiers in July 2003 to show volume of trading observed at various market locations: Tier 1 over 100,000 MMBtu/day; Tier 2 over 25,000 MMBtu/day; Tier 3 less than 25,000 MMBtu/day. (2)In September 2004, NGI added additional price transparency to each of its price newsletters by publishing the actual volumes and number of deals used in the calculation of each price index. However, NGI will continue to make available the number of indexes that fell into each of the three tiers as a tool for measuring the levels of price liquidity and reporting month-to-month.

For more information, contact Dexter Steis at (703) 318-8848.