The Energy Information Administration’s Roy Kass said proposed changes to the weekly gas storage survey probably won’t be made anytime soon because of the variety and complexity of the comments and the nature of the inquiry.

In response to some calls from commenters for monitoring wholesale spot gas prices and pipeline daily throughput, Kass said EIA simply lacks the resources for that. He noted that this inquiry is strictly on the revision policy for the storage report and it is unlikely that EIA will be making any changes to anything other than the storage report as a result.

In a July 11 Federal Register notice, EIA requested comments mainly on proposed changes to its revision policy, including a plan to make large revisions available to the public the morning after they are discovered rather than waiting until the weekly survey is released on Thursday morning.

“There were some comments in there that, frankly, I hadn’t thought of,” said Kass. “It’s going to take us a while to digest them. This has never happened before. It is uncharted territory certainly for the natural gas division, and as far as I can tell, for the EIA. We want to get it over with fast, but we don’t want to rush to something that is going to end up being undone.”

Kass said EIA is exploring many options but is focusing on suggestions about changes in its estimation procedure, particularly using three months of complete historical data rather than one month in coming up with the weekly estimation ratio. “We have a statistician working on and exploring what the implications of that would be,” he said (see Daily GPI, Aug. 26, Aug. 13, July 12). “The theory is if you average two or three months together, then if you have a significant change in any one month that is going to be blunted.”

Changes in EIA’s estimation ratio due to a shift to a new month of complete historical data has been blamed for repeated revisions to EIA’s weekly data. The revisions are likely to continue because EIA does not intend to change its methodology. However, EIA hopes to minimize them by using multiple months of actual data in its calculation.

The other big questions EIA will address, according to Kass, are whether to issue a revision if the change is less than the current threshold of 7 Bcf (or another number), and whether to issue a revision the morning after it’s discovered if it is larger than 35 Bcf (or some other large number). EIA current make revisions only if they are larger than 7 Bcf and holds them until the Thursday morning report.

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