It looks like no one in the energy industry is attempting to beat the rush by submitting the required Form 552 natural gas trading data to FERC early for 2009. With one month left before market participants must comply under the latest extended deadline, the Commission shows no submissions.

The Federal Energy Regulatory Commission (FERC) earlier this summer pushed back the Form 552 reporting deadline from July 1 to Oct. 1 as the Commission set about clarifying some of the guidelines for how market participants should detail the aggregate volumes of annual natural gas purchases and sales. The July 1 deadline already represented an extension so that FERC could hold a technical conference in late March.

This is the second year that companies will be required to file Form 552s (see NGI, June 29, 2009). The filings will report a company’s total volume of natural gas sales and purchases for 2009; the volume of transactions that were priced at fixed prices; and the volume of transactions that were reported to price index publishers. The Form 552 reporting requirement sprang from Order 704, which FERC approved in December 2007 (see NGI, Dec. 24, 2007). FERC is requiring market participants to file these reports in order to provide greater transparency concerning the use of indices to price natural gas and how well index prices reflect market forces.

Form 552 data collected for 2008 as of Oct. 10, 2009 revealed that 1,097 separate submitters responded to the form, reporting a total physical gas market of nearly 62 Tcf of gas, or almost three times the 21.4 Tcf domestic marketed production in 2008. That discrepancy is explained by the fact that the same package of gas may be resold multiple times. The Commission also found that the top 10 sellers of physical gas comprise 61% of the total. The top four gas sellers for 2008 were BP, ConocoPhillips, Shell Energy and Macquarie Cook Energy.

The 2008 data showed that fixed price deals for next-day and next-month gas, together, accounted for less than 24% of total sales or purchases, while index deals for next-day and next-month gas accounted for 66% of total sales or purchases.

Order No. 704-C, issued in mid-June, revises form 552 to:

Producers and industrial gas consumers during a late March technical conference urged FERC to clarify the types of “unprocessed” transactions that should be reported in time for their next Form 552 report (see NGI, March 29).

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