Coral Energy’s growing e-business website, coralconnect.com, will useWeathermarkets.com to give its 2,000-plus current users specializedenergy weather information. The newest addition to the site will offerNorth American forecast graphics for heating and cooling degree days,current and forecast surface conditions and winter weather, as well asEuropean degree days, Scandinavian temperature and precipitationinformation and worldwide sea conditions.

Ian Clark, managing director of WeatherMarkets.com, said thepackage will enable coralconnect.com users to make decisions basedon forecasts for “today out to three months forward,” both forheating and cooling degree days and temperature and precipitation.He said the sea conditions forecast will provide “insights andpossible shipping delays around the world.”

Houston’s Coral Energy launched its website in November (see NGI,Nov. 22, 1999), and there now are twobasic components, an information area and a transaction area. Coral’sJimmy Fox said that the information area offers prices, weather, newsand analysis to about 2,000 current registered users.

The transaction component of coralconnect.com was launched in March(see NGI, April 3). It allowsregistrants of the site to make term gas deals with Coral and offersNymex and basis financial transactions.

“We selected Weathermarkets.com because they offer the widestand most useful selection of information for our user community,”said Mark Hendrix, CIO of Coral.

Because of the current market volatility in natural gas prices,Fox said the site has seen a lot of activity in the past few weeks.He thinks adding the weather information will add to itsusefulness.

“When we designed the site, we created focus groups to give usfeedback on what they wanted to see,” Fox said. “Weather has alwaysbeen a very popular feature.” But Fox added that the site willcontinue to be upgraded. More features for the transaction area areplanned in the near future, he said.

Carolyn Davis, Houston

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