SUBSCRIBER NOTE: Platts to add editorial judgment to daily North American natural gas indices

S&P Global Platts proposes to add editorial judgment to final daily North American natural gas indices for Platts locations.

On November 21, Platts announced an agreement with Intercontinental Exchange to improve natural gas price transparency and bolster North America price benchmarks. To that end, Platts is proposing to add editorial judgment to final daily North American natural gas indices for Platts locations. The change would not take place until the end of the transition period of the Platts-ICE agreement, which at this time is expected to last until the end of Q1 2017.

Currently Platts does not publish a daily price if there are no reported transactions. In addition, Platts is required to use the volume-weighted average of reported trades. Adding editorial judgment allows Platts to assess a daily price if either there are no reportable transactions, or if the volume-weighted average is not deemed to be representative of trading activity.

Platts will use other market information such as ICE physical bids and offers, historical daily prices, and basis relationships to values at related liquid locations in the assessment process.

In either case, Platts will denote the assessed price with an asterisk in price tables and will publish an assessment rationale describing how the assessed price was derived.

Please send any comments to the proposals above to gas_survey_comments@platts.com and pricemethodology@spglobal.com by January 13.

For written comments, please provide a clear indication if comments are not intended for publication by Platts for public viewing.

Platts will consider all comments received and will make comments not marked as confidential available upon request.