NEW DELHI: Country's first automated delivery-based gas trading platform - Indian Gas Exchange (IGX) has secured its authorisation to operate as a Gas Exchange as per the provisions of the Petroleum and Natural Gas Regulatory Board (Gas Exchange) Regulations, 2020 for a period of 25 years.
The GER 2020 Regulations were notified by the PNGRB on September 28, 2020.
IGX submitted its application for authorisation on October 8, 2020 in accordance with the prescription under the GER 2020 regulations.
D.K. Sarraf, Chairperson Petroleum and Natural Gas Regulatory Board (PNGRB) said, "PNGRB is pleased to grant the necessary authorisation to the Indian Gas Exchange Limited basis its application dated October 7, 2020. With this development, IGX has become the first regulated gas exchange in the country.
The Exchange will play an instrumental role in transparent discovery of gas prices, accelerate investments in the value chain, aid in capacity utilization of pipelines as well as boost consumer confidence and in turn increasing gas demand in the country."
"We wish IGX team the very best in this endeavour and hope it makes a meaningful contribution to India's target of increasing the share of gas in the overall energy mix from 6 per cent to 15 per cent by 2030".
S.N. Goel, Chairman Indian Energy Exchange and Director, IGX said, "The market mechanism will create competitive markets to benefit the end consumers with competitively priced gas and cost-effective price signals, will facilitate demand growth thereby leading to development and investments in upstream and downstream parts of the value chain.
IGX also envisions to create Indian gas benchmark as IEX has done for electricity"
IGX is incorporated as a wholly owned subsidiary of the IEX. The electricity trading platform offers trade in electricity through its various market segment such as real-time, day-ahead as well as term ahead markets.
Recently, the Exchange also commenced trading in renewable energy at its platform.
The electricity price discovered by IEX serves as most competitive benchmark for the power value chain and the distribution utilities as well as open access consumers have been leveraging the Exchange to optimize their power procurement portfolio.
The Indian Gas Exchange (IGX) currently offers trade in five contracts namely: Daily Weekly, Weekday, Fortnightly and Monthly at three physical hubs at Hazira and Dahej in Gujarat and KG Basin in Andhra Pradesh.
The Exchange will shortly commence trading with over 500+ registered Clients and 14 Members. Since its launch on June 15, 2020, the platform has cumulatively traded 74, 600 MMBTU.