Oklahoma Municipal Natural Gas Coalition
How the system decides — and how much of the decision
it is trusted to make.
A walk through the autonomy ladder, what goes into each decision,
where we are today, what's next, and how we prove it works.
Prepared for Bill & Rob · 2026-07-01 · point-in-time, no peeking
What we'll cover
How the system moves from watching to doing — safely, one rung at a time.
The full picture the system weighs before it recommends anything.
What is built and running right now.
The near-term road to acting on your behalf.
The scoreboard — and why the way we test it means the numbers are honest.
The detailed playbook for OGT, Southern Star, and everyone else — for after the scoreboard.
View → Suggest → Act. The system earns trust before it takes it.
The principle
The system climbs a ladder. Each rung hands over a little more, and only after the rung below it has proven itself on your real months.
The system recommends. A person executes. Every decision arrives with its reasoning, alternatives, and what it would cost to do nothing. You stay fully in control.
The system prepares the action; you approve it, then it executes. One click instead of a spreadsheet. The judgment is still yours.
The system acts inside a window unless you stop it. For routine, reversible moves only. You get notified with time to intervene.
The safety mechanism
Every individual action carries its own reversibility class — a ceiling on how much autonomy it can ever be given. The system always takes the lower of the two.
In-tolerance nomination, no-fee pull from a sister town.
Ceiling: Phase 3 — may auto-act with an interrupt window.
A deliberate storage withdrawal.
Ceiling: Phase 2 — must be approved first.
Locking in baseload at a panic price; answering an OFO.
Ceiling: Phase 1 — always a human's call.
Safety property we can state plainly: even at full autonomy, the system will never auto-commit a critical, hard-to-unwind move. Those always come to you.
First the full picture. Then what must happen, and why.
The shape of every plan
Everything true about this town this month, that anyone could verify:
What the system believes must happen, and why:
We call this the Monthly Operating Plan. It's the single artifact a scheduler reviews — and the same object the system would eventually act on.
The Picture · every lever, every month
For each tool we track four things: what you're entitled to, what's available this month, its current state, and its limits.
The monthly commitment bought at first-of-month price.
A finite account — inject in summer, draw on cold days. The catastrophe hedge.
Same-day withdrawal to cover a spike without a market buy.
Move gas between sister towns — often no fee.
Borrow or lend against the pipeline within terms.
The running over/under position and its cash-out rules.
Facts we know from your contracts are shown plainly; anything we're still estimating (live inventory, today's imbalance) is flagged as estimated until the pipeline feeds are wired.
The Plan · the eight decisions
Cheapest cover first — the same instinct a good scheduler has, made explicit and applied every time.
The one thing it's optimizing for
The objective is to protect the coalition from bad outcomes, weighted toward the tail — the cold-snap and Uri-scale months that do real damage. It is not trying to beat the market on an average day.
Every recommendation is built from only what was knowable at the time — the prices, weather forecasts, and contract terms in hand at bid-week. Never a number that hadn't happened yet.
This is the discipline that makes the test results in Section 5 trustworthy: the system in a backtest sees exactly what it would see live, with the clock moved back.
The data behind the picture · weather
Honest limit: daily forecasts are trustworthy out to ~16 days — there is no reliable 30-day. So forecasts sharpen day-to-day execution, not the month-ahead commitment. And because forecasts are stored as-issued, a replayed decision only ever sees what was known that day.
The data behind the picture · prices
“Gas Daily” — today's spot price. What you pay to cover a shortfall on a cold day, or receive when selling back extra. Live from NGI, reaching back to 2008.
Set once at the start of each month (Inside FERC). The price your baseload is locked to — the big monthly commitment.
The market's price today for a future month. How we value and plan months that haven't priced yet.
How the engine uses them: baseload is committed at the monthly price; a shortfall is bought at the daily price (a little more on cold days, when it spikes); leftover gas is sold back at a discount. If the monthly price spikes far above its normal range, the engine trims the baseload — a panic price usually reverts, and you don't want the whole month locked to it.
Every price is stamped with the instant it was published — a replayed decision can never see a price that hadn't printed yet. Same no-peeking discipline as the weather.
The whole chain is built — from raw data to a plan on a scheduler's screen.
Built end to end
12 years of daily usage across 19 towns; real point-in-time daily & first-of-month prices (NGI, live); verified tariff rulebooks for Southern Star, PEPL, and Oklahoma pipelines.
Sizes each town's monthly baseload, sizes storage-sharing pools collectively, and carries a storage account across months so the savings are actually bankable.
Generated automatically per pool & month — Picture + Plan, with confidence flags and autonomy ceilings on every action.
Running behind a secure OMNGC-themed site; schedulers can open a plan and see the picture, the recommendation, and the reasoning.
Honestly: which rung are we on?
Live now. The system produces a complete plan with reasoning; a scheduler reviews and executes. This is where trust is earned.
Next build — the approve-then-execute wiring.
Later — reversible moves only, always with a stop window.
Deliberately. We want a season of the system's suggestions sitting next to what your schedulers actually did before anything acts on its own.
The road from suggesting to acting — and sharpening the picture.
Near-term priorities
Build the approve-then-act workflow: a scheduler approves a recommendation and the system carries it out. The first real hand-off.
Connect pipeline inventory & imbalance so the "estimated" flags come off — a firmer picture, especially the storage number.
Enter more towns' storage & pooling entitlements. The dollar value scales directly with how many towns we can represent — only two carry storage in the model today.
A short list of questions for you & Rob — sellback terms, the OGT pooling agreement, and the risk-appetite dial — each worth real money in the results.
Also in flight: regulatory watch (OCC scanning + calendar) and continued model sharpening on individual towns.
One decision is genuinely yours
The system can be tuned to buy more or less protection against catastrophic winters. More protection costs a small premium in mild years and pays off enormously in a Uri.
This is a coalition call, not a modeling one. We've made it priceable so you can set the dial deliberately.
The scoreboard — and why the way we keep score makes it honest.
How we test · the method
We run the system across 2020–2026, month by month, feeding it only what was knowable on each decision day. The backtest and the live product are the same code — one just has the clock rewound.
Every month is scored against naive (buy the same as last year), perfect (best possible in hindsight), and — where we have it — what your schedulers actually did.
Success = how much of the naive→perfect gap we capture with information available at the time.
How we test · the discipline
Every change to the model must clear a pre-registered gauntlet — set before we look at the result, so we can't move the goalposts:
Improves the town-vs-scheduler comparison on real decisions.
Stays within the fleet-wide guardrail across all six years.
Keeps the Uri-event protection — the whole point of the exercise.
Levers that fail are documented as rejected right in the model, so we don't relitigate them. Several promising ideas have been tried and turned down this way.
Where the numbers stand
| Town | Pipeline | vs. scheduler | |
|---|---|---|---|
| Copan | Southern Star | +$49.2K | ▲ system ahead |
| Granite | Enable / EGT | +$8.2K | ▲ system ahead |
| Ripley | OGT | −$11.0K | residual shoulder over-buy |
The system wins the cold months decisively — where the money is — and gives a little back in mild shoulder months. The remaining gap on Ripley is understood and being worked.
The tail is preserved: in a rerun of the Uri event, the system captures +7.9% more than naive — that protection was not traded away to win the mild months.
Model v0.6.0 · forecast era · scored against actual scheduler decisions on real point-in-time prices.
The clearest win we can attribute
Drumright + Mannford, sized together with their shared storage account, over 16 months:
The value is storage, not diversification — a firm backstop lets the system size the monthly commitment lean without fear, so it stops over-buying in warm months and still covers the cold-day spikes. The savings are bankable: we track the account across months, and it never runs dry.
Honest caveat: only two towns hold storage in the model today, so the fleet-wide figure grows as we enter more entitlements (Section 4).
Take it with you
Everything in this deck, written up long-form for a non-scheduler — the worked Ripley replay, the storage finding, the four-town test, the no-peeking methodology, a plain-language glossary, and the tariff + decision-record appendices.
28 pages · PDF · July 1, 2026. The Good, the Bad & the Ugly — three featured towns, the combined outcome (before-fixes and today-deployed), the full results of both fixes (OGT anchor +$86K, the demand-side fix +$26K on Tuttle), and the Ripley decision dossiers.
The four systems' balancing, penalty, pooling & storage rules — verified against the posted tariffs.
Regenerated under model v0.7.0 (OGT anchor) on real point-in-time prices · dekacern.org/reports
One objective, three playbooks. The tools on each pipeline differ — so the decision does too.
How we decide · OGT
This is exactly what your schedulers do — they buy ~1.0× usage; the model used to buy ~1.6×. We measured it and taught the engine to match, with an expected-usage anchor that recovers the OGT over-buy losses. The honest catch: buying lean accepts a surprise-cold hit — the proper OGT tail hedge isn't baseload, it's storage (the ONEOK Gas Storage question). How lean to buy is a risk dial.
How we decide · Southern Star
This is where we beat your schedulers (Copan +$55K) — the flexibility covers cold months cheaply without a warm-month penalty, and sizing storage towns together is worth +$1.87M. Autonomy tracks reversibility: in-band nominations & no-fee pool pulls can auto-run with an interrupt window; a storage draw needs approval; locking baseload at a panic price is always a person's call.
How we decide · everyone else
Zero tolerance for shorts since Dec 2025 (Critical Notice 6224). The rule writes itself: never be short. Size adequately, tight nomination discipline, treat every day like an emergency order. (Granite +$9K.)
Monthly balancing — the greater of 1.5× the daily contract quantity or 1,000 units — and post-month trading through the 17th business day. More room to true up cheaply after the fact.
On every pipeline the molecules are bought from a supplier at the monthly index + a small adder (e.g. Southwest Energy). The pipeline is how it's delivered and balanced — the supply contract is the price.
The gap we're closing: OGT and EGT terms are contractual and not yet verified against posted tariffs — today we run from the schedulers' memory, flagged on every decision. Getting those agreements sharpens all three playbooks. This is a standing ask.
In summary
No storage → buy expected usage, cover spikes on the spot market, skip the baseload tail-insurance. Now matches the scheduler — the real tail hedge is storage.
Full toolkit → size long with confidence, draw storage on cold days, pool and net monthly. This is where we beat the scheduler.
Rule-driven → never short EGT, true up Panhandle monthly. On every pipe, the price is the supply contract.
Where we stand: we beat your schedulers where we have the tools — Southern Star, Enable, every real cold snap. The OGT fix just recovered +$86K of the gap. Across all towns over the last 6 months we're not ahead yet — the remainder is storage not-yet-scored plus the fast-growing towns — but the path to parity is in hand.
The other half of every decision
Every buy has two unknowns: the price of gas and how much the town will burn. Our sharpest fixes so far were about price and flexibility — this is the load side.
Evidence: on Tuttle's ramp winter, giving the model that one ticket cut the loss nearly in half — −$54.8K blind to the ramp → −$28.6K with it, a $26K save. Human knowledge in; the system supplies the prompt, the scheduler supplies the "because."
In one breath
Today: the full chain runs and suggests. It beats your schedulers where the money is, and keeps the catastrophe hedge intact.
Next: the first hand-off (approve → act), firmer live data, and more towns' flexibility on the map.
Two things we need from you: the short expert-question list, and a decision on how much tail insurance to carry.
Dekacern · decide in dekatherms · 2026-07-01