New descriptions for US coal, emissions symbols effective Dec. 20

As previously announced, effective December 20, 2010, Platts is adjusting the descriptions of its US coal symbols in line with Platts' general practice of naming assessments of well-known, commonly traded, standardized products to reflect delivery locations.

In addition to the four commonly traded, standardized products in the daily OTC coal trading market, Platts is extending a standard approach for defining symbol descriptions to cover all US coal and NOx/SO2 emissions symbols. For a complete list of the active symbols affected by this change, including their current and revised descriptions and a summary of the approach used to create the latter, click on the following link, or copy and paste it into your web browser: http://www.platts.com/IM.Platts.Content/MethodologyReferences/NewDiscontinued Codes/Codes/uscoal20dec10.xls or http://bit.ly/uscoal20dec10 The revised descriptions will also be available via the Platts FTP and web sites in the weekly symbol files to be generated on December 18.

In addition to revised descriptions, there are two other changes:

* Selected core emissions assessments are provided to both coal and emissions data subscribers - see the CANO/CASO and EANO/EASO symbols in data categories CO and EJ, respectively. To complete this offering, 3 new symbols have been defined in category EJ - see the entries on the Emissions tab with 'Add' in column A. These new symbols will begin updating shortly in parallel with the corresponding CANO symbols in category CO.

* In order to provide more specific descriptions for emissions assessments expressed in US$ per allowance, a new unit of measure code, ALW, has been defined. Previously, the UOM code for $/allowance assessments was set to UNS (unspecified).

The new approach for symbol descriptions is also being applied to discontinued US coal and emissions symbols.

The revised descriptions will be available shortly in the Platts Symbol Directories at http://www.platts.com/SymbolAndPageDirectories. If you have any comments or questions regarding this announcement, please contact your local Platts Customer Care representative, or email support@platts.com.