2002

President Bush is scheduled to sign into law this week legislation that imposes tougher inspection and other safety standards on interstate natural gas and hazardous liquid pipelines.

Olympic Pipeline Co., along with three current and former pipeline employees, and ex-pipeline operator, Equilon Pipeline Co. LLC, pleaded guilty and no contest, respectively, in a Seattle federal courtroom last Wednesday to criminal charges stemming from the fatal rupture and subsequent gasoline spill and explosion on the Olympic petroleum products line in Bellingham, WA, in mid-1999.

Olympic Pipeline Co., along with three current and former pipeline employees, and ex-pipeline operator, Equilon Pipeline Co. LLC, pleaded guilty and no contest, respectively, in a Seattle federal courtroom Wednesday to criminal charges stemming from the fatal rupture and subsequent gasoline spill and explosion on the Olympic petroleum products line in Bellingham, WA, in mid-1999.

Ongoing concerns about the level of cash flow Dynegy Inc. will be able to generate with its restructuring led Moody’s Investors Service to downgrade the Houston company and its subsidiaries late Monday.

The Committee of Chief Risk Officers (CCRO) says it expects to have new guidelines in place by the end of January for companies submitting data to energy pricing publications and for the publications themselves. At a meeting last Wednesday in Houston, a technical working group made up of members of CCRO companies and representatives of pricing publications “moved in the right direction,” according to Mike Smith, the CCRO’s executive director.

In much-watched oral arguments before FERC last Monday, California representatives decried El Paso Corp.’s attempts to “mightily” turn the high-profile complaint alleging market manipulation on the part of the company’s affiliates into a case involving pipeline safety.

In much-watched oral arguments before FERC Monday, California representatives blasted critics who have tried “mightily” to turn the high-profile complaint alleging market manipulation on the part of El Paso Natural Gas into a case involving pipeline safety. “El Paso’s cry of safety is a blatant attempt to divert this Commission’s attention from the fact that [it] failed — failed egregiously, failed miserably — to fulfill its contractual service and regulatory obligations in California,” said Kevin J. Lipson, attorney for Southern California Edison. But El Paso Corp. attorneys said capacity on its system was reduced to alleviate safety concerns, and argued that detractors were attempting to second-guess the pipeline’s operating judgment.

NRG Energy Inc. said that it intends to continue to conduct business as usual despite the recent filing of an involuntary Chapter 11 petition against the company by five former NRG executives. The Xcel Energy unit also said the filing of the involuntary petition does not put the company into bankruptcy, nor is the company subject to restrictions imposed on debtors under the U.S. Bankruptcy Code.

Now that ISO New England and the New York Independent System Operator (NYISO) have dropped their plans to create a Northeast regional transmission organization (RTO), the two regions will compete directly “for the few investment dollars left on the table,” Energy Security Analysis Inc. (ESAI) concludes in a research memo issued this week.