FERC last Tuesday said it would preserve for the next owner a number of environmental and technical reports related to the stalled storage project of Red Lake Gas Storage LP in Mohave County, AZ.

Red Lake Storage asked the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission to take this step in order to keep the storage project “warm and alive” in the event the company should be sold, said James F. Bowe Jr., a Washington, DC, attorney for Kansas City, MO-based Aquila, parent of Red Lake Storage.

Aquila is engaged in active negotiations with several parties to sell the company, Bowe told NGI. Neither Bowe nor Rick Frantz, Aquila’s vice president of business development, would identify potential buyers.

The Commission said it would preserve the documents for a period of at least nine months from July 7, allowing any qualified successor to the Red Lake storage project to incorporate the documents into its application for a certificate.

FERC terminated the proceeding for the storage project in June 2003, after Red Lake said it couldn’t do the project without market-based rates. The agency twice had denied market-based rates to the company, concluding that Aquila had too much market power in the Southwest region during peak demand periods.

The storage project, if it had been approved by FERC, would have been Red Lake’s only asset.

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