While she hasn’t come to any firm conclusions as to possible changes that may need to be made in the collection and dissemination of natural gas prices in the wake of revelations that certain traders apparently reported false data to various trade publications, FERC Commissioner Nora Brownell said on Wednesday that her own personal opinion is that the government shouldn’t shoulder this responsibility.

“I think I’ve said, and would continue to say, that if there’s any preference it’s that…I personally, and this is me alone, do not think it’s a government function,” Brownell said in an appearance before a press briefing sponsored by the U.S. Energy Association in Washington, DC.

“I don’t think it’s necessary or appropriate, and by the time we got around to doing it right, somebody else would have solved the problem,” she told NGI during the Q&A portion of the meeting.

Her comments came a day before the Commission convened a technical conference to discuss issues related to the adequacy of natural gas price information (see related story).

“What’s fascinating about the indices issue is that what I’m told by market participants is that everyone has known for years that people were reporting in probably not a responsible way, yet people have continued to use it,” she said. “That seems very odd to me, an odd way to run a business.”

She noted that FERC has called upon the energy industry “to come forward with a resolution.” Brownell said that “the challenge for all of us is to see what’s appropriate. Is this an appropriate government role? Is it appropriate for the publications themselves, who’ve taken a number of steps to clean up the data and assure their accuracy, or is there another model?

“Collectively, we have to figure out what the best model is because I don’t ever believe a marketplace can work in a way that you can’t have the integrity of data,” Brownell said.

“That’s one of those areas where there would be some who say, ‘FERC you do it and you do it tomorrow’ or let DOE do it,” she noted. “I think we need to be thoughtful about our approach and I also think we need to fully diagnose the problem and we need to fully understand what information is needed. I don’t think anyone is well served by asking for volumes of information that aren’t going to be used or that compromise confidentiality,” she said.

But Brownell also said that “there is an integrity issue here that has to be dealt with.” She is hoping that at Thursday’s technical conference, “We get a whole lot closer to what it is we’re going to do next. If, in fact, we need to mandate — ‘You will report this’ — I think that we’ve all separately kind of said well, we would consider that. I haven’t heard a clarion cry for that, but there have been people who’ve suggested that’s the way to do it.”

While she said the overall issue is a “work in progress,” Brownell also emphasized that “it’s not going to be a work in progress forever. We really can’t afford, in the poisonous atmosphere that’s been created by all of these revelations, we just can’t afford to have anybody question the integrity of the market or any aspect of the market.”

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