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ONEOK, INC. v. LEARJET, INC. 

Opinion of the Court 

FERC promulgated new regulations designed to further
this process of deregulation.  See, e.g., Regulation of Natu­
ral  Gas  Pipelines  after  Partial  Wellhead  Decontrol,  50
Fed. Reg. 42408 (1985) (allowing “open access” to pipelines
so that consumers could pay to ship their own gas).  Most 
important here, FERC adopted an approach that relied on
the competitive marketplace, rather than classical regula­
tory  rate-setting,  as  the  main  mechanism  for  keeping 
wholesale  natural-gas  rates  at  a  reasonable  level.    Order 
No.  636,  issued  in  1992,  allowed  FERC  to  issue  blanket 
certificates  that  permitted  jurisdictional  sellers  (typically
interstate pipelines) to charge market-based rates for gas,
provided that FERC had first determined that the sellers 
lacked  market  power.    See  57  Fed.  Reg.  57957–57958 
(1992); id., at 13270. 

After the issuance of this order, FERC’s oversight of the
natural-gas market largely consisted of (1) ex ante exami­
nations of jurisdictional sellers’ market power, and (2) the 
availability  of  a  complaint  process  under  §717d(a).  See 
Brief  for  United  States  as  Amicus  Curiae  4.    The  new  
system also led many large gas consumers—such as indus­
trial and commercial users—to buy their own gas directly 
from  gas  producers,  and  to  arrange  (and  often  pay  sepa­
rately)  for  transportation  from  the  field  to  the  place  of
consumption.  See  Tracy,  519  U. S.,  at  284.    Insofar  as 
interstate pipelines sold gas to such consumers, they sold
it for direct consumption rather than resale. 

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The  free-market  system  for  setting  interstate  pipeline 

rates  turned  out  to  be  less  than  perfect.    Interstate  pipe­
lines,  distributing  companies,  and  many  of  the  customers 
who  bought  directly  from  the  pipelines  found  that  they
had  to  rely  on  privately  published  price  indices  to  deter­
mine  appropriate  prices  for  their  natural-gas  contracts. 
These  indices  listed  the  prices  at  which  natural  gas  was