Claim

Rapidly escalating natural gas costs claimed another casualty in the fertilizer industry on Thursday as Mississippi Chemical Corp. announced the shut-down of its Donaldsonville, LA, nitrogen complex. While the price of natural gas, a feedstock for some chemicals, continues to climb, there has not been a corresponding rise in chemical and fertilizer prices, and much of the nation’s fertilizer production has moved overseas.

A claim by a former employee for the Financial Times’ (FT) subsidiary Resource Data International (RDI) Monday before a California state Senate committee alleging that FT’s Gas Daily natural gas price index was manipulated by traders, brought a prompt retort from Gas Daily’s current owner that the account was a “misrepresentation of the facts.”

Weighing in on the Alaska pipeline debate and whether government subsidies for Alaska gas production is warranted, Jim Antoine, Minister of Resources Wildlife and Economic Development for the Northwest Territories said treaties, agreements and statutes identified to support gas development 25 years ago are no longer applicable to today’s discussions surrounding an Alaska natural gas pipe. On Sept. 17, Antoine formally asked federal Minister of Natural Resource Herb Dhaliwal to look into the legal status of the 25-year-old agreements.

Alberta’s First Nation and Metis aboriginal groups are signaling a more active participation in Canada’s energy exploration and development, after signing an agreement Tuesday with Lakota Drilling to transfer the ownership and eventually the full operatorship of three heavy-duty drilling rigs. Collectively, the aboriginal groups will eventually invest a total of C$13.5 million toward the overall purchase cost of the rigs, and EnCana Corp. has made a minimum four-year drilling commitment at competitive rates to ensure that the rigs are fully engaged.

It was another week of change for those involved with the current and the former Enron Corp. last week, with ex-employees scoring victories in court, more top executives joining the ranks of the unemployed, and almost all new and old members of the board of directors announcing plans to resign.

Anxious Houston-based employees Friday were waiting for formal news that their employer, Enron Corp., had filed for bankruptcy, expected to be the largest in U.S. history, and also to learn whether layoffs will begin in the United States as they have in Europe. Across the country, others kept an eye on whether Enron would file a lawsuit against its short-term merger partner Dynegy Corp. for backing out of the transaction last week. Meanwhile, companies that had once dealt with the former trend-setting energy trader continued tallying their own expected losses should Enron go under, and analysts began looking at the pieces, attempting to comprehend and explain a situation gone terribly wrong.

Central Canadian distributors have won the right to stake a claim on natural gas from offshore of Nova Scotia, after a hard-fought contest against production and transportation interests primarily bent on expanding deliveries to the United States.

Central Canadian distributors have won the right to stake a claim on natural gas from offshore of Nova Scotia, after a hard-fought contest against production and transportation interests primarily bent on expanding deliveries to the United States.

Energy Secretary Spencer Abraham has come under attack from the energy sector for stating last week that the United States is “well on our way toward a dangerous dependency” on natural gas.