DOB Energy - Unlocking Hidden Value
June 29, 2026
In today’s fast-paced environment, many shippers in the Nova Gas Transmission Ltd. (NGTL) system are unknowingly leaving significant money on the table. While holding valuable firm transportation contracts on the NGTL system — TC Energy’s extensive gathering and transportation network spanning over 24,000 km across the Western Canadian Sedimentary Basin
Operational conditions shift rapidly due to maintenance, outages, changing flow patterns, weather, and market volatility. This creates both risk and opportunity. Yet unused firm contract transportation often generates zero value while other shippers continue paying a premium on interruptible service.
Our estimates suggest unused firm receipt contract transportation (FT-R) alone may represent $300–360 million in underutilized firm contracts across the pipeline system annually. At the same time, shippers relying on interruptible transportation are paying roughly $60-80 million per year in less reliable service.
Hummingbird: Helping You Reduce Your Natural Gas Transportation Costs
This is fundamentally a logistics and information challenge. At TOTEC Solutions Ltd., we built Hummingbird specifically to address it.
Hummingbird is an Alberta-made, independent digital marketplace for temporary and permanent assignments in the secondary market on the NGTL system. It enables producers to anonymously monetize unused firm transportation contracts while giving interruptible shippers access to more reliable, cost-effective options.
The Structure of NGTL
The NGTL system is a highly complex, largely full-contracted pipeline network with over 1,100 receipt points and 300+ delivery points. It was designed and regulated to ensure reliable, long-term capacity for natural gas producers in Alberta and northeast B.C., connecting supply to domestic and export markets.
Firm transportation (FT) contracts provide priority service and reliability, secured through long-term commitments that underpin pipeline expansions and operations. This structure supports infrastructure investment while providing shippers with certainty. Interruptible transportation (IT) offers flexible access when service is available at a premium but without the same guarantees — it can be curtailed during constraints, maintenance, or high demand.
This firm-heavy model evolved for valid operational and commercial reasons. It prioritizes system stability, hydraulic feasibility, outage management, and fair allocation in a basin with dynamic production and demand.
For shippers relying on interruptible transportation (IT), securing reliable temporary service on NGTL can be a fragmented and time-sensitive process. Compatible opportunities are often scattered across bilateral relationships, broker networks, spreadsheets, and manual outreach, making it difficult to quickly identify available capacity during outages, maintenance events, or localized constraints. As a result, producers may continue paying premium interruptible rates or face curtailment risk even when compatible unused firm contracts exists elsewhere in the system.
The Coordination Problem — More Than a Scarcity Problem
At its core, the challenge in the secondary transportation market is not primarily one of scarcity but of coordination.
Market participants must navigate project area and design delivery area compatibility, full-lateral constraints, meter-specific availability, operationally sensitive areas, timing, and administrative burdens. These factors limit viable transactions and generate substantial friction, especially for smaller or mid-sized players without large dedicated teams.
Compatible opportunities exist more often than transactions occur. Many participants hold temporary flexibility in their firm portfolios, but individually these may not represent meaningful deals. Collectively, they could create scale for viable temporary arrangements. Traditional bilateral negotiations make it difficult to identify counterparts, align timelines, assess operational feasibility, or overcome administrative hurdles— especially during outages or localized constraints when timing is critical.
Many shippers may lack full visibility into their own unused firm transportation contracts. The result: latent value remains dormant, firm contracts sit idle, and interruptible users rely on uncertainty.
This coordination friction explains why potentially beneficial temporary transportation opportunities frequently fail to materialize, even in a system where overall firm transportation is heavily contracted.
Solving the Coordination Challenge – Key Features
An anonymous negotiation system that protects your commercial sensitivity.
Clear visibility into compatible opportunities by meter, incorporating operational realities like project areas, DDAs, outages, and constraints.
Clear Savings Reports - transparent, easy-to-understand reports that clearly demonstrate your transportation cost savings.
Many-to-one negotiation to allow sellers and buyers to split or collect volumes to bridge the gap between what is offered and what is needed.
Bill mitigation solutions – access our Alternate Access tools to reduce your FTD billing.
Portfolio management tools — utilization forecasting, data visualization, outage information by meter, and automated billing estimates.
Natural gas producers can transform unused firm contracts from fixed overhead into liquid assets. Interruptible shippers can reduce costs and improve reliability. It’s a genuine win-win that unlocks value already existing in the market.
Please note that every transaction generated in the Hummingbird platform is subject to review and approval from NGTL’s standards and protocols.
Take Control of Your Transportation Portfolio
If your company experiences imbalances of firm contract transportation on NGTL, or is often seeking firm contracts during outages, this is a product for you.
We provide easy-to-understand reporting that clearly measures the savings you achieve with Hummingbird. Transparent savings tracking is a core part of our service and our commitment to helping you significantly reduce your natural gas transportation costs.
Curious how much value is sitting in your underutilized Firm Transportation (FT) contracts on the NGTL system? Reach out to the TOTEC team today at hello@totec-solutions.com to receive a free customized report analyzing your specific meters and opportunities.
Our experts will show you exactly where savings are hiding — and how our Hummingbird platform can help you visualize constraints, optimize transfers, and capture real cost reductions at the meter level. Don’t leave money on the table.
The coordination problem is real. The solution is here.
Disclaimer: Hummingbird is an independent digital marketplace operated by TOTEC Solutions Ltd. TOTEC Solutions is not affiliated with, partnered with, or endorsed by NGTL, TC Energy, or any other pipeline operator. All analysis is developed independently based on publicly available information