Okay, very good. My name is Steve Lappin, president of ICE NGX.
I'll give you a very brief and quick background on our role in the energy markets. Then Greg Abbott, head of operations, will talk a bit more specifically to the data: indices and some of our settlements information.
ICE NGX is a leading physical energy exchange based out of Calgary. We've been around for about 25 years. Unlike most quantity exchanges, we actually get involved in the physical products, so when you trade commodities with us, physical energy, natural gas, and electricity actually move and whatnot. I've been at that for a while.
We were recently purchased by ICE. They purchased us last year. It started with backing by the pipelines in 1993 with Westcoast Energy, which is now Spectra. In 2001, it was OMX, which is part of the Nasdaq group. In 2004, the Toronto Stock Exchange Group owned us. In 2012, of course, they became the Maple Group. Then, as I said, in December of 2017, we became part of the ICE group.
We have dominant market share in Canadian physical spot gas. Greg will talk about our physical natural gas markets. That and our power indices are the Canadian benchmarks in terms of pricing. We handle Canadian crude oil as well, and we have some pricing and data on that front.
We also have U.S. operations set throughout the majority of our business. The dominant portion is on the Canadian side, but we do have markets throughout North America.
All of our markets are traded on the ICE front-end trading platform, and everything is electronically traded. We do get some, what we call, over-the-counter clients as well, which is where bilateral counterparties have entered into an agreement and then bring it to us for clearing.
We have both the exchange and the clearing house side of the business. The clearing side is your typical clearing house. It takes in all of the transactions. We provide both a physical and financial assurance and guarantee to assure performance.
We typically hold about $2 billion or $3 billion in collateral to secure those positions, those transactions, that take place. It's a non-mutualized model, which means that the counterparties trade directly with us. They don't go through a broker-dealer or any sort of intermediary.
With regard to some key assorted facts, we have about 275 counterparties annually clearing about $35 billion in terms of transactions that are done. We settle up about $500 million to $1 billion monthly. The total daily volume is about 45 billion cubic feet. The total Canadian production is around 16 billion cubic feet. Obviously what we transact is a multiple of the entire underlying Canadian natural gas volume as well. We have over 90 different clearing hubs and locations, as I said, throughout North America.
From a regulatory perspective, a highly regulated entity, the Alberta Securities Commission is our primary regulator here. It oversees us both in terms of an exchange and a clearing house. In the U.S., we're overseen by the Commodity Futures Trading Commission, as a derivatives clearing organization, as well as a foreign board of trade as an exchange. We also have EU recognition as a third country central counterparty.
In terms of a brief background regarding our markets, the majority of what we do is out of what we call “AECO AB-NIT”, which is here in Alberta. As I'm sure you understand, that is the predominant production of natural gas supply in Canada, so that is where our single largest market is. The next largest would be out of Dawn, Ontario, where a lot of the gas moves for consumption both within Ontario and then further on into the U.S. Those are our two major markets.
On the electricity side, we have both Alberta power and Ontario power. Crude oil is mostly done through our brokerage affiliate entity. We provide the indices and numbers for that. That is on the Canadian crude oil products throughout Canada, but again, predominantly in western Canada for all the major grades of crude oil.
In the U.S., as I said, our natural gas markets are throughout the U.S. We also run the Texas physical electricity markets there as well.
I think that's really it. We have a wide variety of contracting parties we deal with. We do have our bank hedge funds, marketers. We have a number of producers, midstream physical pipeline, utility, storage companies, and what not. In addition, and this is a sort of segue into the data part, we have over 70 view-only customers. As you can imagine, we collect a lot of data and information from all these transactions. Certainly our trading entities use it, but as well we have additional business with those who don't transact but simply subscribe to and use our data for other purposes.
With that, I'll turn it over to Greg Abbott. I'll let Greg walk you through a bit more on what we do on the data side.