Combination

Belllevue, WA-based Puget Energy, holding company for the combination utility, Puget Sound Energy (PSE), announced late Wednesday its earnings for the third quarter were reduced by about half of the results for the same period last year, and that the holding company plans to sell 15 million shares of common stock to fund utility operations and reduce short-term debt tied to a nonutility merchant construction business. Puget shares were selling at $20.85 early Thursday.

The combination of softer crude oil prices and forecasts calling for moderating temperatures were enough to keep the bulls corralled Monday as the natural gas market eased from Friday’s 30-month highs. Monday’s price softness led September futures to a low of $9.38, but buyers stepped in and the contract closed for the day at $9.54, down 4.8 cents for the session.

The good news for growing U.S. natural gas demand is that declining traditional reserves can be replaced by a combination of Rocky Mountain unconventional supplies and increased imports of liquefied natural gas (LNG), but the bad news is the fact that permitting for new supply projects in these two sectors may be difficult to obtain, a panel of energy lawyers told an industry conference Thursday in Santa Fe, NM. Ultimately, Uncle Sam or neighboring Mexico could hold the keys to unlocking these supplies.

Upper Midwest combination utility NorthWestern Corp. reached an agreement with the creditors committee of its former communications services subsidiary Netexit Inc., formerly Expanets, on a bankruptcy liquidation plan that will provide NorthWestern with an initial payment of $20 million and will set aside another $35.9 million to pay creditors with any remainder going to Northwestern.

Not only should FERC retain its existing authority to review mergers of public electric utilities and combination electric-natural gas utilities, but it should be expanded, said FERC Commissioner Joseph Kelliher last Wednesday.

Not only should FERC retain its existing authority to review mergers of public electric utilities and combination electric-natural gas utilities, but it should be expanded, said FERC Commissioner Joseph Kelliher.

Petrofund Energy Trust said Tuesday it purchased about 4 million boe in western Canadian gas and oil reserves (84% gas) through a combination of three property and corporate transactions for a total purchase price of C$66.4 million. The majority of the production is located in Alberta and British Columbia with minor interests in Saskatchewan.

The cash market was still finding enough power generation load — prompted by a combination of warm temperatures and a spate of nuclear plant outages, both intentional and unscheduled — to eke out further generally small price gains at a majority of points Wednesday. But El Paso-San Juan quotes actually fell by 2-3 cents and several other points, nearly all of them in the West, were flat to barely higher. Gains ran as big as about 20 cents.

A combination of underlying factors, some of them unexpected and not widely known, probably will lead to another record for average annual natural gas prices this year, speakers at GasMart in New Orleans said on Thursday. Some of the causes are clear, including lower production and record high crude oil prices, while others are not as clear, such as the weak dollar and rising industrial output despite high fuel costs.