ICE Weighs Demand for Its Newly Acquired Chicago Carbon Dioxide Exchanges

Intercontinental Exchange Inc., which last month purchased Climate Exchange Plc for $597 million, is trying to determine whether companies still want to trade on the Chicago-based unit of its acquisition, Chief Executive Officer Jeff Sprecher said.

ICE’s focus in buying Climate Exchange was its European business and not its Chicago-based trading hubs for carbon dioxide credits and futures contracts, Sprecher said yesterday on a conference call with analysts.

A cap-and-trade program, in which companies buy and sell carbon dioxide pollution rights, has operated in Europe since 2005. Legislation to establish a U.S. carbon cap-and-trade program narrowly passed the House of Representatives last year and then stalled in the Senate.

The European Climate Exchange in London is “growing quickly and it’s the business that we wanted to own,” Sprecher said. Running the Chicago Climate Exchange and the Chicago Climate Futures Exchange “is a loss-making business as it exists today” and ICE is examining the impact of the U.S. “delay in cap-and-trade” on the trading hub, he said.

“It remains to be seen now, in an uncertain U.S. regulatory environment, whether companies are going to want to continue to walk down their carbon footprint,” Sprecher said. ICE plans to “talk to the market about how they view that business now and what they think we should do with it.”

To contact the reporters on this story: Simon Lomax in Washington at slomax@bloomberg.net; Mathew Carr in London at m.carr@bloomberg.net

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