Intercontinental Exchange (NYSE: ICE), the leading global network of exchanges and clearing houses, today announced that ICE Endex has agreed with GasTerra, the international natural gas trading firm, to open the registration for the auctions for the facilitation of natural gas storage services in the Netherlands for the contract year 2016-2017.
ICE Endex has successfully operated auctions for virtual gas storage services since 2011, with auctions taking place twice a year in November and February. On a daily basis, ICE Endex facilitates the delivery processes and financial settlement of the gas product.
Gas storage services are sold in the form of “standard bundled units” (SBUs), which allow market participants to inject or withdraw gas from a virtual storage facility. A SBU has a capacity of 1,440 kWh and participants may withdraw between 0.6 and 1.0 kWh per hour and inject up to 0.3333 kWh per hour. The total annual gas storage space is almost 20 billion kWh of natural gas or 13,229,456 million SBUs. The natural gas from this virtual storage is delivered at the Title Transfer Facility (TTF), which is the benchmark Dutch natural gas trading hub.
On 20 November 2013, 4,130,555 SBUs were sold for the contract period of 2014-2019. As a result the remaining 9,098,901 SBUs will be offered divided over two auctions for the contract year 2016-2017. The SBUs are a 1-year product for which the price mechanism is a fixed price. The total amount of 1-year SBUs will be equally divided over two auctions; the first one taking place on November 18, 2015, and the second on February 10, 2016.