February 2006 Market Clearing in the Energy Industry 77 © Copyright 2006, CCRO. All rights reserved. NCC/ North American Energy Credit and Clearing Corp (“NECC”) New York Mercantile Exchange (“NYMEX”) ICE/LCH Clearnet Virtual Markets Assurance Corporation (“VMAC”) Natural Gas Exchange and has demonstrated capability to implement large- scale archetype infrastructure for evolving competitive energy markets. CCorp (formerly BOTCC) is an independent clearing organization serving multiple regulated and OTC markets for over 80 years. Annual volumes cleared have been as high as 1.2 billion amounting to $50 trillion in notional value. Over its history CCorp has successfully protected its members from financial harm. ICE is the largest electronic market in the U.S. for trading power and natural gas spot, forwards, and swaps. It operates a flexible trading platform that supports bilateral and cleared OTC markets as well as futures markets with infrastructure with 99.99% system availability and sub-second response time. weathered without incident, include two Gulf Wars, the collapse of Enron (and associated industry credit crunch), Hurricane Andrew ravaging the natural gas contract’s delivery area, and most recently, record oil market prices and volatility. Standard and Poors have rated NYMEX an AA+. trades are executed on the ICE system than on all other electronic systems combined. monitoring function is performed by FSA. VMAC’s insurer, FSA, is rated AAA/Aaa/AAA. Daily settlement payments need not be guaranteed since the Termination Payment, designed to compensate for market loss, is made on default. Cash movements are made via a banking relationship with the Bank of New York. Exchange acquired NGX. Product Offerings NECC states it can readily add new products as they become available on ICE or in RTO markets. NECC’s NYMEX has the ability to add new products to in electronic clearing and trading platforms efficiently and within Currently there are approximat ely 30 oil, gas and power VMAC states that it is able to configure swaps for any products for which there is an index and NGX presently offers nearly 15 physical gas contracts, and nearly 15 financial gas