Blog Viewer

On November 6, APGA sent a letter to the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission (FERC) expressing concern about the lack of liquidity in many U.S. natural gas markets and the impact that is having on index prices established by price reporting agencies. As communicated in the letter, a recent report indicated that “natural gas fixed-price volume potentially reported to price-index publishers experienced the largest year-on-year drop since 2009 [for 2018 calendar year].” APGA has been involved in this issue for several years. Donnie Sharp of Huntsville Utilities served as APGA’s representative on a 2017 FERC Technical Conference on the issue of hub liquidity.

In the letter, APGA communicates that it finds these recent data and price indices heading into winter alarming. The letter goes on to ask FERC to “induce more price reporting; refresh and reissue its policy statement including its ‘safe harbor’ for good faith reporting concerning this matter in a manner that the record support; and encourage the current standard but modify the policy to allow a reporting entity to elect to report just its monthly transactions and not be bound to submit daily transactions as well.”

APGA meets with the FERC Commissioners twice a year and will be doing so again on November 13. The issue of hub liquidity will be among the issues that will be raised. A copy of the letter sent to the Commission is available on the APGA website.

For questions on this article, please contact Dave Schryver of APGA staff by phone at 202-464-2742 or by email at dschryver@apga.org.