Times are changing for gas storage
- By Jeffrey Foutch
- Published 10/15/2007
- Valuation
- Unrated
Jeffrey Foutch
Mr. Foutch is a Co-Founder, Executive Vice President and the Chief Commercial Officer of the Company. Mr. Foutch is in charge of trading, origination, marketing and business development, as well as the day to day commercial operation of the storage facilities including gas control and trading/facility optimization. Mr. Foutch has over 27 years of experience in the trading and marketing of natural gas. Mr. Foutch also is responsible for all of Falcon’s hedging and price risk management activities for natural gas, oil and NGL. Prior to the formation of Falcon, Mr.Foutch served as a consultant to IMDCI a natural gas storage and transportation optimization company. From 1997 to 1999, Mr.Foutch served as the Vice-President and head of Natural Gas Trading for Tejas Power Corporation, managing a 40 person trading operation and optimizing up to 20 Bcf of storage capacity. From 1992 to 1997, Mr. Foutch served as the U.S Eastern Region Vice President of Natural Gas Trading for American Hunter Energy, managing over 4 Bcf/day of physical and financial positions. Mr. Foutch also has held various management positions with Ashland Exploration, American Oil and Gas, Cabot Corp., International Paper, and The Superior Oil Company. Mr. Foutch received a Master of Business Administration degree from the
In the ever-changing natural gas business, it seemed that gas storage usage remained the same year after year. The only change was the amount stored for seasonal swings in natural gas and electric generation usage.
That was then. Pipelines and local distribution companies (LDCs) used natural gas storage as a tool to balance these seasonal swings and to mitigate natural gas supply shortages during peak periods. Typically, storage was tied to only one pipeline, and bundled with the pipeline’s other services, limiting a storage customer’s flexibility to take full advantage of the storage capability.
This is now. “Winter/summer peaking” and “shoulder month injection” seasons are replacing traditional “summer injection” and “winter withdrawal” seasons. More natural gas storage is being developed by independent companies. Driving the change are unbundled pipeline gas services and demand from independent power producers (IPPs) to provide load following services for electric generation.
In short, storage is being designed and used in completely different ways today.