Commodity Futures Trading Commission Chairman Gary Gensler said Dec. 2 that the nation’s futures trading platforms for energy remain vibrant and important to the economy, with 315 million energy futures and options contracts traded on regulated exchanges in the first ten months of the year.

In testimony before a panel of House Energy and Commerce members last week, Gensler said West Texas Intermediate, or WTI, was the largest crude futures contract traded during that period by volume. Some 114 million WTI contracts changed hands, the equivalent of 114 billion barrels of oil, with a notional value of $7 trillion, he said.

Gensler said the largest contract in natural gas was NYMEX’s Henry Hub natural gas contract, with 38 million contracts. That’s the equivalent of 380 billion BTU’s of natural gas with a notional value of $1.6 trillion. Energy futures markets also include very significant trading in electricity contracts, which, as a class, had more than 23.5 million contracts traded representing 7.5 percent of the overall volume in the energy sector.

These WTI contracts are traded on the New York Mercantile Exchange and on the electronic IntercontinentalExchange platform or ICE. The corporate headquarters of ICE is in Atlanta, but its trading platform is run from London. NYMEX, which is owned by Chicago’s CME Group, has a hybrid trading system, with a trading floor in New York City and an electronic platform called Globex.

Gensler’s testimony was part of an effort by the Obama administration to overhaul the nation’s financial framework after last year’s market crash that was blamed on weak regulatory regime. Since taking over in June as head of the agency, he has aggressively pursued fraud cases and has recently asked Congress for the authority to set position limits in the energy market and to bring the notoriously secretive over-the-counter derivative trades under strict federal oversight.

In last week's testimony, Gensler continued to hammer the same points, saying transparency was key to an efficient and sustainable market. He wants all standardized OTC transactions moved to regulated exchanges and for records of the trades to be kept.

If any trading group is to be exempted from these transparency rules then the exemption has to be narrow, he added.

“Transparency greatly improves the functioning of the existing securities and futures markets,” he said. “We should shine the same light on the OTC derivatives markets.”

He added, “OTC derivatives transactions should be aggregated and made available to the public. The CFTC currently collects and aggregates large trader position data and releases it to the public. We should apply the same transparency standards to OTC derivatives. This will promote market integrity and protect the American public.”