• Improved regression equations for US residential, commercial, and industrial demand
• Improved estimates for demand drivers - economic growth, population, income, customer counts
• Improved supply outlooks for Gulf of Mexico (including Eastern Gulf / Independence Hub), Gulf Coast, North and East Texas, Arkansas, Louisiana, BC, and offshore Nova Scotia
• Improved calibration

• Better calibration targets for Barnett Shale production areas
• Better estimates for Independence Hub production (Eastern Gulf)
• New flow calibration for US exports to Mexico
• New flow calibration for deliveries to NYC on Tetco and Transco
• New flow calibration for deliveries to California (GTN, KR, EP, TW, SoTr)  
• New flow calibration for receipts and deliveries on GTN 
• More comprehensive pricing data from Gas Daily and ICE

• Improved infrastructure modeling

• Updates to REX and related pipes moving gas further east
• Re-modeling of several pipes to eliminate "loop flows", flows from one zone to another and back to the first due to long-haul discounts (negative costs and losses) on pipeline links
• Improved pipeline supply links in the Eastern Gulf and eastern portion of the Central Gulf
• Inclusion of new Rockies pipes (Sunstone, Ruby, Bronco) and other projects (Tetco Northern Bridge, Transwestern Phoenix Expansion).
• Update of rates (Columbia, Tennessee, Trunkline) 

•  The Calibration Summary Report has been greatly enhanced.  It now features graphs showing the correlation of the supply and demand quantity calibrations in addition to the bias, price, and flow calibrations.
• The use of FDQ and ZDQ has been improved; you can now enter percentages and it will calculate the volume.
• You can now model NDQ (Negative Discount Quantity) on zones directly, simulating rent from congestion.  This rent is displayed in the Pipeline Zone Price and Pipeline Use Summary Reports.
• A new report, Storage Use vs Plan, supplements the Storage Balance report.  This report shows the working gas in storage monthly versus the min and max of the storage plan.  It also shows infeasibilities and any instances where storage use is less than or greater than the min/max storage plan range and is able to graph these quantities.

GPCM licensees can now download the latest GPCM software update (version 9.8.8) while GPCM Base Case licensees can also download the 2007 Q3 Base Case release.   GPCM users will be glad to be able to display prices in the Market Point Price and Basis report in three different modes:  real, nominal (based on your own inflation forecast), or mixed (nominal in the past, real in the future).  Users will also be pleased with several speed-ups to various programs incorporated into this release.  Base Case licensees will be happy to have a more detailed model of storage with over 400 storage fields represented, the entire list from EIA's annual EIA-191A survey, plus the Canadian storage fields.  In addition, calibration stats have improved by 5% since last quarter and regression equations have been improved for several states in the industrial and electric sectors.

RBAC announced today the simultaneous release of its GPCM Version 9.8.7A software and 2007 Q2 Base Case Database.  Working in tandem, these releases contain a brand new model of gas demand in the US electricity generation sector. 

This model consists of three pieces:  1) a monthly, state-level model of electricity supply (generation), 2) a state-level model of gas generation capacity and 3) a monthly, state-level model of gas demands in the electricity generation sector.  These models have been statistically estimated over the time period Jan-2001 through Dec-2006 using explanatory variables such as GSP (gross state product), CDD (cooling degree days), HDD (heating degree days), GEN (generation), and CAP (gas-fired capacity).  The model is serial in that the GEN (generation) model feeds the ELC (gas-burn) model which feeds the CAP (gas-fired capacity) model which also feeds back to the ELC model. 

The release contains a fresh new forecast for Mexican supply and demand, gleaned from the Energy Ministry of Mexico's annual Prospectiva for natural gas, supplemented by RBAC's extension of this forecast from 2016 to 2030.

It also contains an updated LNG forecast and production forecast for Canada and the United States.  This forecast takes into account recent drilling activity and investments in non-conventional gas production in North and West Texas, Colorado, Utah, Wyoming, Arkansas and Louisiana and updates trends with more recent data in other states as well.

The software release contains substantial enhancements in several areas, primarily in the infrastructure and scenario builders.  A new document detailing how to use these builders is also now available in this release.

All of this release is available to licensees under the "My Files" area of the website.

RBAC, Inc. has released GPCM version 9.8.6, with enhancements to features and performance of their flagship GPCM® Natural Gas Market Forecasting System.