2006

Natural gas futures continued to explore the upside Wednesday as crude again posted new all-time highs. After trading as low as $7.870 and as high as $8.280, May natural gas ended up finishing the regular session at $8.192, up 18.4 cents on the day, bringing the three-day total gain to $1.057.

Duke Energy accepted an order from the North Carolina Utilities Commission (NCUC) approving Duke Energy’s planned merger with Cinergy. Duke and Cinergy planned to close the merger over the weekend (April 1).

The widely held belief that speculators in the futures market were behind the sharp run-up in natural gas prices over the past year has no basis in fact, said Commissioner Sharon Brown-Hruska of the Commodity Futures Trading Commission (CFTC) Tuesday.

Mexico has been in talks with a half dozen companies about building and supplying a liquefied natural gas (LNG) terminal at the port of Manzanillo, according to a Reuters News Service report. The country’s Federal Electricity Commission (CFE) is expected to open tenders in the first half of next month.

FERC on Wednesday rejected a rehearing request seeking to reinstate a preexisting statute of limitations for parties to bring complaints alleging violation of the agency’s new regulations targeting manipulation in the natural gas and electricity markets.

A former employee of ex-Enron Corp. CFO Andrew Fastow testified Tuesday that backdating company documents within some of the company’s special purpose entities (SPEs) was so common it was jokingly called “time travel” in the office. Chris Loehr, one of the few government witnesses not under indictment to testify at the trial of Enron founder Kenneth Lay and ex-CEO Jeffrey Skilling, appeared to bolster Fastow’s claims about financial shenanigans within LJM partnerships, which were used to keep Enron’s poorly performing assets off the balance sheet.

In some of the most explosive and combative testimony to date in the trial of Enron Corp. founder Kenneth Lay and ex-CEO Jeffrey Skilling, ex-CFO Andrew Fastow testified last week that Skilling used off-the-book partnerships to illegally revise earnings beginning in 1999, and told jurors that Lay not only knew about the financial shenanigans before the company dissolved into bankruptcy but also actively took part in deceiving shareholders and the news media.

The Senate Energy and Natural Resources Committee overwhelmingly voted out bipartisan legislation last Wednesday that would make a significant amount of additional acreage in the natural gas-rich eastern Gulf of Mexico available for leasing. The bill, however, is expected to face stiff opposition from Florida’s senators and other Gulf Coast lawmakers when it comes before the full Senate.

Nationwide energy efficiency resource standards (EERS), consisting of energy savings targets set for utilities and a market-based energy efficiency trading system, could cut energy use by 5% in 2020 and save consumers $170 billion over the 2007-2020 period, according to a new report that was released in Washington, DC, Thursday by the American Council for an Energy-Efficient Economy (ACEEE).