Natural gas customers in Arkansas will see their bills increase beginning today, three natural gas utilities in the state reported Friday in filings with the Arkansas Public Service Commission.
The increases, compared with bills last winter, range from about 3.5 percent to 24 percent.
The change in rates is based on more than the cost of natural gas, said Alicia Dixon, spokesman for CenterPoint Energy, the state's largest utility with about 420,000 customers.
"It includes all the costs to get natural gas from the wellhead to our customers," Dixon said. "We are not always perfect at collecting what gas costs are. We have to look at what we've collected from customers and also look forward at what we expect prices to be doing [in the future]."
That is the case for all three utilities.
Monthly bills for Houston-based CenterPoint will rise nearly 3.5 percent, Dixon said. That means a CenterPoint customer who had a $100 monthly bill last winter will have a bill this winter of $103.47, Dixon said.
SourceGas, which has about 155,000 customers in Northwest Arkansas and across the northern third of the state, will have bills increase almost 24 percent, said John Bethel, executive director of the commission's general staff.
A SourceGas customer with a $100 monthly bill last winter will have a bill of $123.87 this winter.
Arkansas Oklahoma Gas, which has about 45,000 customers in the Fort Smith area, will have an increase of about 17 percent over the next five months, Bethel said.
An Arkansas Oklahoma Gas customer who had a bill of $100 last winter will have a bill of $116.47 this winter.
This year, all three utilities are collecting more because they collected less than their costs in previous months, Bethel said.
"All three [of the natural gas utilities] were giving a credit back to customers for overcollection [in previous months] and now they have a surcharge for undercollection," Bethel said.
The companies are required to report their gas costs to the commission at the end of each October. Those rates are passed along to customers with no profit going to the utilities, Bethel said. The commission does not have to hold hearings to approve these rate changes.
CenterPoint purchases large quantities of natural gas in the summer, when prices are typically lower, and then takes it out of storage in the winter, Dixon said.
The rates will continue through March 31.
Natural gas costs have been low this year, although still higher than the historical lows of 2012.
Natural gas futures traded near an 11-month low in New York earlier this week, Bloomberg News reported. Natural gas for November delivery fell 0.3 cent to $3.557 per million British thermal units in trading on the New York Mercantile Exchange, Bloomberg reported. Prices are down 16 percent this year.
A Btu is the amount of heat required to increase the temperature of a pound of water 1 degree Fahrenheit.
The National Weather Service forecasts that temperatures this winter in Arkansas likely will be cooler than normal, said Chris Buonanno, science and operations officer at the National Weather Service's office in North Little Rock.
Business on 11/01/2014