Skipping Stone, a Houston consulting firm, has offered its solution to the natural gas pricing and index issue. It advocates the creation of a non-profit data aggregator, The Energy Transaction Repository (ETR), to collect transaction data from market participants and provide services to match, verify and confirm the transactions.

ETR would then share that data with index providers, relevant government and oversight entities, and approved external audit firms. Index providing publications would supply ETR with their methodologies and ETR would use those methodologies to calculate the indexes and sell them back to the publications. Revenue also would be generated by charging data providers and by making data available to third parties for research.

The system would provide timely deal confirmations to each counterparty and send the confirmed and unconfirmed data back to each market participant’s internal audit or risk oversight personnel on a daily basis to foster compliance and self-policing needs.

“The benefits of providing confirmations to deals goes beyond eliminating duplication for price reporting purposes; it provides an independent daily verification for internal audit, external audit and government compliance requirements.” stated Peter Weigand, Skipping Stone CEO.

The ETR solution is being circulated to market participants, said Greg Lander, a Skipping Stone principal. Information is available at www.skippingstone.com. “We are seeking as much additional feedback as possible on the proposed solution and have posted a web survey to bolster our efforts,” added Lander.

The system would be managed by independent employees with an elected broad-based stakeholder board. A working group has identified readily available technology that will enable the ETR solution to be implemented within three to six months of approval. “By utilizing existing technology, the overall cost of start up and savings in ongoing operations significantly reduces the burden to the industry,” said Weigand.

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