A word on terms. A scheduled quantity is a nomination that cleared the cycle, not metered flow; measured “actuals” post days later. Every daily interstate flow series in the market, ours included, is built from scheduled quantities. That is not the difference. The difference is what happens next.
The national supply and demand figures the market is used to take that sample of postings, decide what share of the country it represents, and multiply. The result is a useful number, and on a settled gas day it is probably close. But it is a model output, and a model is only as good as its last recalibration. A parser that breaks, a meter that gets reassigned, a plant that switches suppliers: each of those moves the multiplier, and none of them shows up in the published figure as anything other than a market move.
We tested this on our own data before deciding not to do it. Scaling our scraped totals to match a national estimate produced a number that was, on most days, simply the national estimate with our noise added. On the flat series, “same as yesterday” beat it outright. It told a trader nothing the estimate would not tell them a few hours later, and it hid the one thing our data is actually good at.
A change. When a pipeline’s scheduled delivery into an LNG terminal drops 400,000 Dth between the evening cycle and ID1, that is not a model adjusting. It is a pipeline telling the market, in a filing it is responsible for, that less gas is flowing there today. Enercast shows you that change at the meter where it happened, on the cycle it happened, from the posting it came from. You can click through to the source. You cannot click through to a multiplier.
Three things follow from that.
Postings only exist where posting is required, so our totals are a sample of the interstate system, not the whole country. We say this on every page rather than papering over it with a multiplier. The main gaps are known and named:
We are actively closing the part of that gap that can be closed. Every week we are mapping additional meters on the pipelines we already scrape and adding new pipelines, and each addition goes through the same three-day validation and mirror test before it counts. Our coverage of the interstate system is materially higher than it was a month ago and will keep rising. What we will not do is invent the rest. If a number on Enercast changes, it is because a pipeline changed what it posted.
Summing postings is only as good as the list of points being summed. Interconnects post on both sides, two-way points net, and a nomination revises across cycles. Every point in our registry clears the same gate before it counts:
A category total is still a sample, and a reroute from a pipeline we cover to one we do not will show as a decline. That is why every total opens into its meters: the point-level detail is the product, and the total is the index to it.
Read Enercast for direction and location: what moved, where, how much, and when it was posted. If you need a single national level for a settled day, an estimate is the right tool, and there are good ones. If you need to know at 6am that something changed at a specific point on a specific pipeline, and to see the filing that says so, that is what we built.