Barring

Barring a surprise outbreak of increases in productivity, Canadian natural-gas exports to the United States are headed for a second straight year of slowing down.

Barring a surprise outbreak of increases in productivity, Canadian natural-gas exports to the United States are headed for a second straight year of decline.

Barring an appeal, a federal judge on Wednesday granted Dynegy Inc.’s request to move its lawsuit against former merger partner Enron Corp. moved from New York City to a Texas court. U.S. District Judge Melinda Harmon of the Southern District of Texas ruled for Dynegy in its countersuit against Enron, which filed a $10.5 billion breach-of-contract lawsuit against its downtown Houston rival after Dynegy backed out of a merger plan at the end of November. Days later, Enron declared bankruptcy.

Barring an unforeseen loss of equipment, the Northeast — having recently fought off broiling temperatures and soaring demands for electricity — should be able to successfully make it through the rest of this summer, according to Tim Gallagher, manager of technical services at the North American Electric Reliability Council (NERC).

Denver-based Barrett Resources Corp., still stating publicly that it is barring the doors against a hostile takeover by giant Royal Dutch/Shell, postponed its annual shareholder meeting set for early May, as it continues to search for strategic options to Shell’s cash offer of $55 per share. Barrett rejected the amount as inadequate, but Shell has continued the pursuit, extending its offer through midnight last Friday.

Questar experienced a mechanical failure Thursday in Unit #7 atits Clay Basin storage facility. Barring unexpected complications,repairs should be complete by today and the unit available forservice again on Tuesday’s gas day, the pipeline said. Injectioncapacity has been reduced to 235,000 Dth/d during the outage.Allocation of injection capacity was expected to occur each day,with the impact determined by customer nominations. However, thereis no impact on withdrawal nominations, Questar said.

Barring unforeseen circumstances, the 14-inch Romere Pass Line offshore southeastern Louisiana (see Daily GPI, July 7; July 18) could be back in service on or around Aug. 11, Sonat said Friday. The line ruptured July 5, causing the shut-in of up to 100 MMcf/d at five receipt points. A repair plan has been completed and submitted to regulatory authorities for approval, the pipeline said. It expects that the approvals could be completed in time for work to begin on or about Thursday of this week. July 27. The estimated repair time is 10-15 calendar days.

Tennessee said road crossing work on its 800 Line will becompleted ahead of schedule. Barring unforeseen circumstances,service constraints upstream of Station 823 (Kinder, LA) will belifted for Saturday’s gas day.

Barring the potential for additional gas demand that couldresult from the Kyoto global-warming accord, the Gas ResearchInstitute (GRI) yesterday projected that domestic natural gasconsumption will rise by about 30%, or 9.5 quadrillion Btus(quads), to nearly 32 quads by 2015. It predicts that producers,both in the United States and Canada, will be able to meet thedemand challenge, but it conceded that the road ahead won’t be aneasy one.