Key Responsibilities and Required Skills for Gas Analyst

🎯 Role Definition

The Gas Analyst is responsible for analyzing natural gas markets, producing reliable supply/demand and price forecasts, supporting commercial and trading decisions, and ensuring accurate nomination, scheduling and settlement processes. This role blends market research, quantitative modeling, contract review, and cross-functional stakeholder engagement to optimize gas value chains across production, transportation and trading desks. Ideal candidates have strong energy market knowledge, analytical rigor, and hands-on experience with gas scheduling and trading systems (e.g., SCADA, nominating systems, Bloom berg/Platts, EIA data).

📈 Career Progression

Typical Career Path

Entry Point From:

Junior Gas Analyst / Market Analyst with 0–2 years of industry exposure
Energy Economics Analyst, Commodity Research Assistant or Graduate Program in Energy Trading
Petroleum/Natural Gas Engineer or Operations Analyst with exposure to pipeline/field operations

Advancement To:

Senior Gas Analyst / Lead Gas Analyst
Gas Portfolio Manager / Commercial Manager – Gas
Gas Trading Desk Lead / Head of Gas Operations
Risk Manager or Director, Gas Optimization

Lateral Moves:

Power Market Analyst (integrated gas-power modeling)
LNG Commercial Analyst / Shipping Commercial Analyst
Asset Optimization Analyst or Pipeline Commercial Specialist

Core Responsibilities

Primary Functions

Conduct end-to-end natural gas market analysis, including regional and seasonal supply/demand balances, pipeline constraints, storage inventories, and weather impacts to produce weekly and monthly market outlooks and price forecasts.
Build, validate, and maintain quantitative forecasting models (time series, ARIMA, VAR, Monte Carlo simulations) for gas demand, supply, and basis differentials to support trading, procurement and budgeting decisions.
Monitor and interpret fundamental market drivers such as production volumes, rig counts, LNG flows, pipeline outages, storage injections/withdrawals, and regulatory updates (FERC, regional transmission rules).
Produce daily and intraday price screens and market intelligence reports using Bloomberg, Platts, S&P Global, EIA, and proprietary data sources for traders and commercial teams.
Perform gas nomination, scheduling and balancing activities in nominating systems and industry platforms, ensuring compliance with pipeline/operator deadlines and minimization of imbalance penalties.
Analyze contract terms, transportation agreements, tolling contracts, and purchase/sale agreements to quantify commercial exposure, capacity rights, and take-or-pay obligations.
Support hedging and risk management strategies by calculating position exposures, mark-to-market P&L, value-at-risk (VaR) and stress testing scenarios across physical and financial gas positions.
Reconcile physical flows with scheduling data, identify variances, investigate root causes, and coordinate corrective actions with operations, counterparties and pipeline operators.
Prepare and present actionable insights and trading recommendations to portfolio managers and senior leadership, translating complex analytical output into clear commercial decisions.
Lead ad-hoc market studies (e.g., impact of new pipeline builds, LNG export facilities, or regulatory changes) and quantify strategic value opportunities for asset and portfolio optimization.
Maintain and enhance data pipelines and ETL processes for market and operational data ingestion (e.g., production, nominations, SCADA, prices) to ensure timely, accurate analytics.
Perform pricing and valuation of physical gas contracts, storage assets and transportation agreements using discounted cash flow (DCF) models and forward curve analysis.
Drive continuous improvement of analytics by documenting methodologies, versioning models, and implementing quality control processes for reproducibility and auditability.
Collaborate with IT and data engineering to deploy models into production, enable dashboarding (Power BI/Tableau) and automate recurring reporting for traders and commercial teams.
Manage relationships with external data providers, brokers and market intelligence vendors to ensure access to high-quality market data and benchmark prices.
Support regulatory filings, compliance reporting and internal controls related to nominations, capacity allocations, and settlement processes.
Conduct scenario analysis for extreme market events (cold snaps, hurricanes, supply disruptions) to evaluate contingency plans and liquidity needs for physical and financial positions.
Coordinate with upstream production, midstream operations and downstream commercial teams to align forecasts, firm capacity commitments, and optimization opportunities.
Train and mentor junior analysts on market fundamentals, modeling techniques, nomination processes and vendor platforms to build team capability.
Lead reconciliation and invoicing support for physical deliveries, capacity usage and imbalance settlement, ensuring alignment with commercial terms and accounting entries.
Evaluate and recommend enhancements to trading systems, scheduling tools and optimization software to improve latency, transparency and decision support.

Secondary Functions

Support ad-hoc data requests and exploratory data analysis.
Contribute to the organization's data strategy and roadmap.
Collaborate with business units to translate data needs into engineering requirements.
Participate in sprint planning and agile ceremonies within the data engineering team.
Maintain and publish daily/weekly dashboards summarizing position, P&L, storage utilization and capacity utilization for stakeholders.
Assist Legal and Commercial teams with contract interpretation for complex nomination and redelivery clauses.
Participate in cross-functional incident response for operational disruptions and emergency nominations.
Represent the analytics function in cross-business working groups focused on market access, capacity expansions and LNG commercialization.

Required Skills & Competencies

Hard Skills (Technical)

Deep knowledge of natural gas markets, hubs (Henry Hub, TTF, NBP), regional basis dynamics, storage mechanics and seasonal demand drivers.
Proficient in Excel (advanced modeling, VBA/macros), including sensitivity analysis and scenario modeling.
Strong SQL skills for querying, aggregating and transforming large market and operational datasets.
Programming proficiency in Python or R for statistical analysis, time series forecasting, and automation.
Experience with market data platforms and pricing services: Bloomberg, Platts, S&P Global, ICE, CME and Eikon.
Familiarity with gas scheduling, nomination and balancing systems, and operational SCADA data interpretation.
Experience building forecasting models (ARIMA, SARIMA, Prophet, machine learning time-series techniques) and implementing backtesting frameworks.
Hands-on experience with data visualization and BI tools: Power BI, Tableau, or Looker for dashboard creation.
Knowledge of derivatives and hedging instruments (futures, options, swaps) and P&L/MTM calculation methodologies.
Understanding of regulatory frameworks and tariffs (FERC, regional pipeline rules) and their commercial impact.
Experience with cloud/data platforms (AWS, Azure) and ETL tooling for building reliable analytics pipelines.
Familiarity with contract valuation techniques for transportation, storage, and LNG tolling.
Strong quantitative skills: statistical analysis, regression modeling, optimization and risk metrics (VaR).
Experience with version control (Git) and documentation best practices for reproducible analytics.

Soft Skills

Excellent verbal and written communication to present complex market analysis clearly to traders, executives and non-technical stakeholders.
Strong commercial acumen and ability to translate analytics into profitable trading or procurement decisions.
High attention to detail and rigorous quality control mindset in data and model outputs.
Proactive problem solving and intellectual curiosity to investigate anomalies and improve models.
Ability to work under time pressure and manage competing deadlines in fast-moving markets.
Collaborative team player who can build relationships across operations, trading, legal and finance.
Adaptability to changing market conditions and rapid re-prioritization of tasks.
Critical thinking and sound judgment for scenario planning and risk assessment.
Coaching and mentoring capability to develop junior team members.
Stakeholder management and negotiation skills when interfacing with counterparties and pipeline operators.

Education & Experience

Educational Background

Minimum Education:

Bachelor's degree in Economics, Finance, Engineering (Petroleum/Chemical), Data Science, Mathematics, Statistics or a related quantitative field.

Preferred Education:

Master's degree in Energy Economics, Financial Engineering, Data Science, MBA with commodity/trading focus, or related advanced degree.

Relevant Fields of Study:

Energy Economics
Petroleum / Chemical / Mechanical Engineering
Finance, Accounting or Risk Management
Data Science, Statistics or Applied Mathematics
Environmental Science with energy specialization

Experience Requirements

Typical Experience Range: 2–6 years of relevant experience in natural gas markets, commodities trading, midstream operations or energy analytics.

Preferred: 5+ years of direct gas market analysis or trading desk experience with demonstrated experience in nominations, scheduling, forecasting and risk management. Experience in LNG commercial operations, pipeline capacity contracting or energy trading systems is highly desirable. Certifications such as CFA, FRM or specialized energy market certificates are a plus.