PG&E Corp.’s National Energy Group entered into an agreement with Duke Energy North America to purchase the company’s Attala Energy facility. Attala is a 500 MW natural gas-fired merchant generation plant located in central Mississippi. The plant which is still under construction, is expected to be in commercial service during the summer of 2001. The plants output will be delivered into the Entergy wholesale market. “This purchase makes us an early and well-positioned entrant into the region’s power market,” said Greg Kelly, vice president Marketing and Business Development of the National Energy Group’s Eastern Region. The companies expect the acquisition to be completed by the end of September pending regulatory approval.

Conoco and online trading firm HoustonStreet Exchange are in the process of forming a joint venture to design, develop and market a web-based version of Conoco’s automated mid and back office energy trading activities for the global energy market. The new venture will develop technology based on Conoco’s existing Crude Oil Information Network (COIN), an automated service which provides pricing, contracting, scheduling, settling and benchmarking of physical crude oil trades. The companies believe that the automation process can save energy companies a sizeable amount of money. HoustonStreet will help develop COIN into an online program that will be available on the web through an application service provider. The name of the joint venture will be released at a later date.

The Georgia Public Service Commission voted 5-0 Tuesday to crack down on marketer billing problems by issuing a Notice of Proposed Rulemaking that would not hold customers to payments on bills that are more than 90 days late. The NOPR also would require that bills be 90% accurate and list charges in a uniform fashion. The commission received more than 3,000 complaints about billing just during the month of August. Billing problems also have been behind several retail marketer bankruptcies in the state. The PSC invites pubic comment on the NOPR, which is available on the Internet at the PSC’s web site: https://www.psc.state.ga.us/. A final vote on the matter is scheduled for November.

Canadian Midstream Services Ltd. (CMSL), headquartered in Calgary, has completed its acquisition of the Nevis Gas Plant and associated facilities from Western Facilities Fund. The plant is now 100% owned and operated by CMSL, has a processing capacity of 150 MMcf/d and offers transportation through a gathering system consisting of 300 km of 4-inch diameter to 12-inch diameter pipelines, inlet compression, sweetening and liquid recovery and fractionation. With the addition of the Nevis facilities, CMSL owns 350 MMcf/d of natural gas processing capacity and 800 km of gathering system. It processes 210 MMcf/d.

North Carolina Natural Gas, a subsidiary of CP&L Energy, is selling its propane operation to Jenkins Gas and Oil Co.,, North Carolina’s largest independently- owned propane gas company with 35,000 customers. Terms of the transaction, which will be completed this fall, were not disclosed. The customer base of NCNG’s propane division totals nearly 12,000. “There’s no question our propane division performs well and provides an excellent return on investment,” said Don Davis, NCNG’s president. “But its comparatively small size would require significant capital to expand to a size that NCNG would want to retain and continue operating as a division.” Excluding propane customers, NCNG retains a base of roughly 166,000 natural gas customers. Davis added, “We have some ambitious plans for the capital derived from this sale and believe those efforts will prove more beneficial to our natural gas customers in the future.”

St. Louis, MO-based AmerenEnergy Marketing entered into a power supply agreement with the not-for-profit Illinois Energy Consortium (IEC). The consortium supplies power for kindergarten through 12th grade schools, colleges and universities. IEC acts as an aggregator of retail electric loads, and disperses the savings between its members. 500 school facilities and 120 school districts throughout southern and central Illinois are covered under the agreement which will go into effect on Sept. 18. Ameren Corp. is a $9 billion asset energy company providing electricity, natural gas and energy services to approximately 2 million customers in Missouri and Illinois.

Denver-based independent Western Gas Resources Inc. yesterday said it would sell its Arkoma gathering system for $10.5 million to an undisclosed buyer. The system consists of 74 miles of gas gathering lines in the Arkoma Basin of eastern Oklahoma, and gas throughput volumes averaged 11 MMcf/d for the first six months of 2000. Western said it would recognize an after-tax gain on the sale of nearly $4 million, or $0.12 per share of common stock for the third quarter of 2000.

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