Come

Battered by negative influences seeming to come from all directions — mostly mild to chilly (but not particularly cold) weather, weak prior-day futures, storage injection capacity growing ever tighter and any tropical storm threat to Gulf of Mexico production deemed unlikely for the rest of the season — the cash market fell at nearly all points Thursday.

A West Virginia man suing two energy companies in the Marcellus Shale wants his case returned to circuit court.

The Pennsylvania Public Utility Commission (PUC) on Thursday denied two requests to reconsider its decision to grant public utility status to a Marcellus Shale gathering project currently under construction.

A proposal by NiSource subsidiary Energy Interchange to provide hub and storage services in Louisiana and Mississippi has come under sharp attack from shippers on affiliate Columbia Gulf Transmission.

PG&E Corp. has named Anthony Earley as its new chairman, CEO and president. Earley is the first PG&E CEO to come from outside the utility in PG&E’s more than 100-year history. As head of Michigan-based DTE Energy and its core businesses of Detroit Edison Co. and Michigan Consolidated Gas Co., Earley was credited with running two of the nation’s more respected electric and natural gas utility companies, according to PG&E lead director Lee Cox, who has been serving as interim CEO since Peter Darbee left earlier this year (see NGI, May 2). “We looked across the industry and found the person best qualified to help us win back public confidence,” Cox said. Earley began his utility career with Long Island Lighting Co. in 1985 and joined DTE in 1994. He previously was an officer in the U.S. Navy’s nuclear submarine program, and holds an undergraduate degree, as well as graduate engineering and law degrees, from the University of Notre Dame.

National Fuel Gas Co. (NFG) will continue to go it alone in the Marcellus Shale, the company said during a quarterly earnings call last Friday.

With even higher temperatures still to come, prices skyrocketed by more than a dollar at Northeast citygates Wednesday while considerably more modest gains permeated the rest of the market.

Shale gas prices are likely to remain “reasonable” for years to come, despite possible upward pressure from hydraulic fracturing (fracking) issues, according to more than 700 executives and managers from utilities and other industry organizations who participated in a recent survey conducted by Black & Veatch.

Now that the energy industry is done marveling at the shale gas revolution and is believing in abundant gas supplies for years to come, a similar North American supply renaissance is in the making in crude oil, Bentek Energy LLC’s Jim Simpson told attendees at GasMart 2011 in Chicago Wednesday.