EMK3 reported that after almost three months of operation it has launched the natural gas component of its online energy marketplace, making it the first marketplace on the block to offer domestic buyers and sellers of both oil and natural gas the ability to electronically acquire and sell production at the source, i.e., from the wellhead.

The company said that large and small oil companies within the industry have joined the online marketplace since the exchange started operation at the beginning of the year (see NGI, Feb. 12).

“Since opening our online petroleum marketplace in February, customers have expressed a strong desire to use the EMK3 system for marketing natural gas,” said Gary Wittsche, president of EMK3. “California’s energy crisis has fostered talk of price caps on natural gas and accusations of industry price gouging. We see EMK3 providing a safe harbor from these accusations because the marketplace provides a neutral environment to establish fair prices. It can be used to aggregate natural gas production at the well in order to make it very easy for utilities and end users to find natural gas at the well site all over America. End users will have price transparency at the well site that was not possible to obtain from the old closed loop system.”

In the offline world, EMK3 said end-users of natural gas can only realistically deal in gas that is both easy to locate and easy to transport. Its online marketplace enables those end-users to now search for and purchase natural gas directly from well-sites anywhere in the U.S. using a variety of search parameters such as by pipeline, county, selling company and field. EMK3 believes aggregators and end-users can benefit by having “greater access to natural gas production and pricing information through the online market and in turn, sellers enjoy the dual benefits of having greater access to buyers and the ability to always receive the best possible sales price.”

“Without an efficient marketplace like EMK3, the oil and gas industry has for many years received the scorn of consumers and regulators whenever energy prices suddenly spike,” said Wittsche. “Companies are now looking to EMK3 as a safe-harbor for the industry because of the marketplace’s superior price-setting mechanism and the protections afforded through the open exchange of information between a greater number of end-users and sellers.”

EMK3 is a private company with offices in Dallas, Midland and Corpus Christi, TX. For more information, visit the company’s web site at www.emk3.com.

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