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

arstechnica.com

37 points·kc0bfv··5 comments

A bit of a follow on from an earlier article:

Texas gov knew of natural gas shortages days before blackout, blamed wind anyway

https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2021/05/texas-gov-knew-o...

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27234151

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

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.

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.

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...

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