Despite a “big lie” that persists among state and national public policymakers, the natural gas market is “extremely healthy” today, and the fact that its margins may be modest could be a good thing in the long run, Robert Dickerman, president of Sempra Energy Solutions, said on Tuesday at the annual GasMart/Power conference in New Orleans.

“The gas market is extremely healthy, and for commercial and industrial customers, it is a very mature market,” said Dickerman. “The fact that customers may not be enjoying enormous savings today is probably good news. They are getting close to wholesale prices today, and the fact that marketers are not enjoying tremendous margins of 10-12% may not be good news for the marketers, but it is healthy for the marketplace.”

Dickerman thinks the price of gas may go even higher in the future. “If you’re concerned about the price of gas today, and you don’t believe fundamentally that we should be in a $5 gas market, that’s another issue,” he said, indicating he thinks that even higher prices may be necessary. Dickerman said he thinks we still have “artificially low” natural gas and oil prices, and he sees the cost of gas staying above $5/MMBtu and oil prices staying above $25/bbl.

“For quite similar reasons, I don’t think we are going to go below $3.50 on gas for a long, long time,” Dickerman said. “But this does not define market manipulation,” he noted, although many public policymakers think it does.

For electricity there is still a “healthy market” for providing various hedging, commodity and back-office services between the wholesale and retail prices, he told the industry audience in New Orleans listening to a discussion of “Is the Retail Commercial/Industrial Market Dead?” Dickerman estimated that only 20% of the huge commercial and industrial market nationally is involved in these services now, leaving a large potential amount of growth in retail services to big customers longer term.

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