THE CHRISTlAN SCIENCE MONITOR
Friday, December 8, 1978
How new law will affect natural gas, if
By Jim Brumm 
Special to
The Christian Science Monitor
	Washington
"If Wishes were horses. the beggars would ride," my grandmother used to say when I ran together a string of wishful thoughts headed by that little word that can have such a big meaning - if.
This week, the line could well read: If wishes were computers. the gas price would be right. For everyone has his own estimate of what the Natural Gas Policy Act of 1978 will cost consumers, and when the impact will be felt.
But few - if any - of those estimates are listing all  the "ifs" (that is, assumptions) needed  to reach   

Analysis
the number they toss out to the waiting world. And most of these  apply to someone  the news services like  to  call  "the  average  homeowner,"  without pointing out that such a person does not exist.
As a rather simple example, one could say that a local distribution utility will have to raise the price it charges residential customers 4.3 percent as a result of the inflationary adjustment Congress included in the law that went into effect last Friday. . .
If all the gas the utility sells was under federal control before April, 1977.
If equal amounts o( each of the 15 categories of prices that now apply to this gas - on which Congress mandated a 12.6 percent inflationary price increase - are being delivered to the utility l;)y its pipeline suppliers.
If the traditional ratio of transportation (two-thirds) and wellhead (one-third) costs apply to the gas this company is delivering.
Percentage can change
But the percentage quickly changes. . .
	If the utility is buying part of its gas from
sources not controlled by federal regulators such as producers in its own state or via what is called emergency procedures that let the utility or the pipeline serving it bargain directly with producers.
If the controlled gas it is buying started flowing from the well after April 1977.
If it is selling imported gas - which could be coming into the United States by pipeline from
Canada or as shiploads of LNG (liquefied natural gas) from Algeria.

If the utility is one of the few that produce
SNG (synthetic natural gas).	.
And none of those assumptions tells the customers of this nonexistent utility when the price bubble will show up in the bills it mails out. The bubble was created when Congress said producers could raise prices Dec. 1 to reflect the full impact of inflation since April 1977.
Adjustments limited
But the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission told interstate pipelines that they could reflect changes in the cost of purchased gas only twice a year. And the local utility does not pass the cost on until the pipeline serving it gets the needed regulatory permission.
The biggest number of these adjustments for changes in purchased gas costs will come in January, when 14 of the 32 pipelines involved are scheduled  to seek approval of price changes. Other applications will come as late as June.	.
Most estimators have not tried to predict the size of that initial price bubble. Rather, they have tried to look at the price impact for all of 1979. By the end of next year, there will have been 12 more monthly price adjustments to reflect. inflation, and gas will have started flowing under another set of "ifs" - the recently established prices for various forms of newly found gas.
	These annual impact projections cover a
wide range -- 4 percent to 50 percent.
On the high end, with projections of a 30 to 50 percent gain in the price residential consumers will have to pay, is Energy Action. This self-labeled consumer group puts no dollar figure on its estimate.
In the middle is the American Gas Association, a trade group representing local gas utilities. It expects the average homeowner's gas bill to increase about $25 next year. That represents an increase of 9.6 percent from the $260 that it expects the average bill to total in 1978.
The low end comes from the application of an estimate developed by the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission staff to a very limited. though possible, circumstance - a utility served completely by interstate pipelines. What the commission's staff did was project that domestic gas producers will get an additional $1.7 billion from interstate pipelines in 1979 because of the new law. That represents an 11 percent increase in the pipelines' purchased gas costs.