Attack

Notable warm trends from weather guidance over the weekend helped push natural gas futures prices several cents higher in early trading Monday. The October Nymex contract was up 6.6 cents to $2.680/MMBtu shortly after 8:30 a.m. ET.

A petition by Southern Natural Gas (SNG) pipeline to amend a stipulation and agreement requiring it to file a new rate case by the end of February has come under attack at FERC.

Natural gas pipeline expansion projects came under attack last week in the courts and at FERC, including a New Jersey group of pipeline opponents that petitioned a federal appeals court in Washington, DC, to review Commission orders with respect to Spectra Energy’s New Jersey-New York Expansion. Tennessee Gas Pipeline and Transcontinental Gas Pipe Line (Transco) projects were the favorite target of environmentalists as well.

A total of $157.7 million was bid last Wednesday in Western Gulf of Mexico (GOM) Lease Sale 229 in New Orleans, the first sale under the Obama administration’s new Outer Continental Shelf (OCS) leasing plan for 2012-2017. BP plc, which was temporarily suspended last week from new government contracts, submitted no bids (see related story).

The latest Interior Department Bureau of Land Management (BLM) proposed plan on oil shale and oil sands leasing on western lands has come under attack from the chairman of a prominent House energy subcommittee.

Spectra Energy’s long-under-attack New Jersey-New York Expansion early last week received unanimous approval from FERC, which means firm natural gas transportation service into Manhattan could be operational sometime during the fourth quarter of 2013.

The proposed Constitution Pipeline has come under attack at FERC from all directions, as landowners and federal officials call on the agency to consider alternatives and put the Marcellus-to-New York natural gas pipeline through a rigorous analysis.

A kerfuffle between the Marcellus Shale Coalition (MSC) and an anti-drilling group over copyright infringement has resulted in the latter removing from its website a logo similar to the one used by the MSC.

Protesters aiming to “Stop the Frack Attack” were planning to hold a three-day meeting in the nation’s capital at the end of this week for obstructionist training sessions and lobbying of Congress, to be followed by a Saturday afternoon demonstration on the West Lawn of the Capitol.