FERC’s technical conference on the reporting of natural gas storage information last week offered some new ideas, according to a Commission official who said staff would be evaluating testimony and offering the commissioners several options.

Industry witnesses last week produced a full spectrum of variations on the theme, both advocating and opposing FERC’s proposal for daily storage reports, questioning cost/benefit and potential accuracy, calling for availability of other current supply-demand information, and/or changing the timing and method of releasing storage information to confound speculators. Several warned against any more upheavals in the energy market right now (see Daily GPI, Sept. 29a; Sept. 29b).

William Hederman, head of FERC’s Office of Market Oversight & Investigations (OMOI) who chaired the all-day storage conference Tuesday, ended it by saying, “We’ve heard suggestions today that might take us in different directions.”

Elaborating on that statement later, Hederman said there might be “other market-relevant information that the Commission can easily make available to the marketplace. Also, if there isn’t a compelling reason to move to daily [storage postings], there may be intermediate steps that the staff should explore….For example, Dominion mentioned they provide their numbers to [the Energy Information Administration] early in the week and post them as they provide them to EIA,” Hederman told NGI. However, if website postings of weekly data were to be proposed for all the data providers in EIA’s survey “there’s the issue of who’s under Commission jurisdiction that we would have to think through.

“We need to flesh out the information about whether the EIA report on Thursday is doing something helpful or harmful to competition in the market, and secondly, is there adequate transparency or is there a need for more transparency. I think the [Thursday EIA] number has taken on an importance that’s out of proportion with the actual significance of the number, and it’s largely because it’s the one thing that happens during the week that lets people kind of check in on the situation Part of what we were trying to explore were the alternatives, so the question is, are the costs of changing worth the benefits of changing.”

Questioned as to whether FERC might aggregate data, as had been recommended by several witnesses, Hederman said “there are dangers associated with disaggregate information in terms of revealing people’s positions; we would have to lay out what the pluses and minuses are.” He said the Commission staff will be putting the record together to give the Commissioners some options.

Hederman said he and FERC staff had had discussions with EIA personnel. Questioned as to whether EIA might change the time of its announcement from 10:30 a.m. EDT Thursday, and instead make it when the futures market is closed, he said EIA had explored that initially, but had become convinced that would disadvantage smaller players in the market, since the larger speculators could use the after-hours sessions to react.

Several witnesses had advocated faster delivery of other supply information such as production or export/import information, but Hederman said “production data is just hard to get anywhere near real-time and that’s kind of a fundamental problem about any progress on that number. EIA’s the place that’s going to remain responsible for production data. Now, on export/import, at least on the LNG side, there may be some options for FERC.”

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