Burden

A federal judge in Louisiana has overturned the Department of Interior’s decision imposing an additional regulatory burden on offshore oil and natural gas operators in the wake of the Deepwater Horizon drilling platform explosion in the Gulf of Mexico.

The California Public Utilities Commission (CPUC) Thursday rejected a request from the state’s major private-sector utilities to reduce the burden on businesses that pay a disproportionate amount of the surcharge on monthly natural gas utility bills that goes for public purpose programs, such as those that assist low-income customers with their bills.

With a stated goal of offering people within the energy industry a way to reduce the burden of rolling index commodities forward every month while also allowing them to track the effects of contango and backwardation in the crude markets, the New York Mercantile Exchange Inc. (Nymex) said last week that it plans to launch the MACI futures and the Backwardation-Contango index futures contracts in February 2008.

With a stated goal of offering people within the energy industry a way to reduce the burden of rolling index commodities forward every month while also allowing them to track the effects of contango and backwardation in the crude markets, the New York Mercantile Exchange Inc. (Nymex) said Monday it plans to launch the MACI futures and the Backwardation-Contango index futures contracts in February 2008.

Since the sale of $9 billion in assets, massive layoffs throughout the company and a debt burden that shook it to its knees, Williams is on the mend, reporting Thursday that it not only beat Wall Street’s earnings forecast, but also raised its full-year 2004 guidance on near-record margins in its natural gas liquids (NGL) processing business.

Since the sale of $9 billion in assets, massive layoffs throughout the company and a debt burden that shook it to its knees, Williams is on the mend, reporting Thursday that it not only beat Wall Street’s earnings forecast, but also raised its full-year 2004 guidance on near-record margins in its natural gas liquids (NGL) processing business.

Since the sale of $9 billion in assets, massive layoffs throughout the company and a debt burden that shook it to its knees, Williams is on the mend, reporting Thursday that it not only beat Wall Street’s earnings forecast, but also raised its full-year 2004 guidance on near-record margins in its natural gas liquids (NGL) processing business.

The burden of increasing North American natural gas production may rest on the shoulders of the independents, according to first quarter earnings reports now beginning to be tallied. Although earnings were sky high, none of the leading oil and gas majors increased North American gas production in the first quarter of this year, and so far, only a handful of the larger independents eked out gas increases.

The cash market finally found the burden of struggling higher with little visible means of fundamental support too much to bear Thursday, resulting in across-the-board retreats ranging from about a nickel to a little more than 15 cents.