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Natural gas customers in Texas get stuck with $3.4B cold-snap surcharge

37 points| kc0bfv | 4 years ago |arstechnica.com

5 comments

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peter303|4 years ago

Colorado utilities are trying to pass on a half billion dollar gas price surcharge from the same week as the Texas disaster.

klyrs|4 years ago

Meanwhile Oklahoma Natural Gas is hoping to charge a $1400 fee to disconnect gas service, or an $8 monthly surcharge for the next 25 years, to make up their losses this winter.

peter303|4 years ago

I wonder who made a fortune from the Feb 2021 price surge? Spot market contracts have a counter party who bets prices will go the other way.

wcoenen|4 years ago

It's either a spot market (i.e. immediate delivery) or a contracts market (e.g. futures, options, CFD). I don't think there is such a thing as a "spot market contract".

In this case the price spike happened on a spot market. The buyers simply needed more gas than was available for sale. So the profits simply went to to the producers that had any gas to sell.

Edit: this Reuters article names some companies that raked in profits:

The biggest winners were companies with access to supplies, including leading energy trader Vitol, gas suppliers Kinder Morgan (KMI.N), Enterprise Products Partners (EPD.N) and Energy Transfer (ET.N), oil giant BP plc (BP.L), and banks Goldman Sachs (GS.N), Bank of America (BofA) (BAC.N) and Macquarie Group (MQG.AX). https://www.reuters.com/business/energy/results-tally-up-bil...