A group of leading companies that market and trade natural gas in North America including Shell Energy North America and bp have announced the formation of an independent company named Eleox. The initial participants in this joint venture—the first of its kind in North America—also include Castleton Commodities International LLC (CCI), Koch Energy, Macquarie Group and Mercuria Energy America.

Eleox will re-imagine commodity post-trade processing through the creation of an enterprise-grade application based on distributed ledger technology to replace many existing, siloed post-trade systems with a unified, full lifecycle platform, the companies said Nov. 15.

This secure, real-time digital approach is being created to manage transactions from post-trade through settlements, replacing paper-based contracts and manual reconciliation processes, and will initially focus on enhancing the post-trade process for North American physical natural gas. The enhanced settlement processing platform will result in increased transparency and accountability while maintaining data security using distributed ledger technology, a single source of truth throughout the trade life cycle and fewer data errors, fewer mismatches and less manual reconciliation, minimizing delays in transaction settlements

The platform will be designed by Eleox and tested by its founding members, which will constitute a key segment of its projected user base and is expected to be available for use by all market participants in late 2022.

“We are excited by Eleox’s roadmap, which offers countless opportunities to improve post-trade processing,” said Eleox CEO Kirk Coburn. “Advances in technology mean we can digitize energy trading in the same way we have seen so many other sectors transform, and our platform will help customers optimize the post-trade process, today and tomorrow.”

“The support of these industry leaders demonstrates both the scale of the challenges facing energy trading companies today, and the resolve from market participants to address them with technology to create a more efficient and secure energy sector,” Coburn said.

Comments