ICC Zaps Gas Companies With Piffle, er, Report
(Springfield, IL) — On April 10, Liberty Consulting Group presented the Illinois Commerce Commission with a review of Peoples Gas and North Shore Gas Company’s natural gas procurement practices, as required by an ICC order in March 2006. Piffle.
No bureaucratic deck-chair goes unmoved, no piece of paper unshuffled. Natural gas prices are sinking already.
The ICC selected Liberty to conduct a management audit into fuel procurement activities of the companies and to recommend changes if necessary.
Liberty’s evaluation of purchases, storing and transporting natural gas to utility customers produced 32 recommendations aimed at improving record keeping, formalizing procedures, separating business units, and developing more accurate measurements of natural gas injections and withdrawals from company storages fields.
The chief recommendations require the companies to:
- Explain purchased gas costs over the audit period for Peoples Energy Services Corporation;
- Explain why the affiliate People Energy Resource Company/Peoples Energy Wholesale Marketing could generate consistently positive margins in wholesale trading while the utilities did not;
- Determine baseline levels for Manlove Field’s inventory and “cushion gas” going forward and submit a report on how stored natural gas is measured in that field, in order to generate an accurate account of how much natural gas is injected into the field and how much is withdrawn; and
- Analyze the cost of facilities required to enable the companies to use more of Manlove’s storage capacity for ratepayers. Peoples Gas claimed it optimized the use of Manlove for ratepayers, but Liberty found no substantiation for that claim.
There are 32 of these little buggers. After all that explaining and analyzing there will be no time for these companies to raise natural gas prices, right? The honchos are laughin’ at the plebes all the way to the bank.
The full Liberty report will be posted–promptly forgotten–to the Commission’s on-line e-docket system, under Docket # 06-0556. The ICC website is at icc.illinois.gov. Hope the site can bear the weight of the onslaught.
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