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After almost 18 months of detailed proceedings and negativelegislative signals, California regulators have pulled backsubstantially from original proposals to unbundle the state’snatural gas industry along the lines of the state’s electricderegulation.

After almost 18 months of detailed proceedings and negativelegislative signals, California regulators have pulled backsubstantially from original proposals to unbundle the state’snatural gas industry along the lines of its electric deregulation.

Unlike a week earlier, the slump in gas demand that almostalways accompanies a weekend had its usual negative effect on cashprices Friday. Declines ranged from only 3-4 cents at Midwest andNortheast citygates to as much as a dime or so at Southwest andRockies points, where most of the maintenance outages at processingplants and compressor stations had ended by Friday. Most otherpoints registered drops of about a nickel.

After touching the lowest level in almost two weeks earlyMonday, the June futures market was bid higher throughout the restof the session as traders took profits from last week’s sell-off.June finished up 5.8 cents for the day at $2.311, just off its$2.32 high.

Bears had their choice of reasons for continuing to push thefutures market lower Thursday: forecasts calling for warmingweather, an unremarkable storage report, and follow-through sellingpressure. And so when the February contract opened more than anickel below Wednesday’s low, the price rout was on yesterday. Thesell-off sent the prompt month 9.5-cents lower to settle at $1.836.

This week’s general price downturn almost came to a haltWednesday, but mild softness remained the norm for most points.Quotes tended to range from flat to down about a nickel. Marketareas were getting colder but not by much, sources said, and thatwas outweighed by further softness in futures. With little toinfluence it, trading activity remains on the quiet side, theysaid.

A lot of cash points came close to matching the screen’s rise ofalmost a nickel Wednesday, give or take a penny or two. In additionto the futures influence, there was “a little bit” of cold here andthere to help generate a modest price rally, though still notenough cold to help much, sources said.

Where there’s new power generation these days, there usually isnatural gas. And Florida will add almost 11,000 MW of power overthe next eight years, according to a recent report by the state’sutilities. Power demand is soaring in the state, particularly inthe southwestern portion, where currently there are no gaspipelines. That’s going to change soon, however.

Almost a third of gas and oil companies surveyed expect to havecompleted Year-2000 (Y2K) remediation by the end of the year,according to the results of a new survey by the Natural Gas Council(NGC). It further found that 73% said they would be ready by June1999, while all respondents indicated they would be prepared byDecember 1999.