Curt

The White House has given the green-light to the renomination ofCommissioner Curt Hebert Jr. for a full five-year term at theFederal Energy Regulatory Commission.

Environmental activist Anne Marie Mueser has accusedCommissioner Curt Hebert Jr. of potentially compromising hisimpartiality in a case involving Southern Natural Gas Co.’s (Sonat) northern Alabama project – a proceeding that is scheduled forrehearing at FERC’s bi-monthly meeting today. She thinks Hebertshould consider recusing himself from the case.

While FERC’s regulatory gas options paper so far has been kepttightly under wraps, Commissioner Curt L. Hebert Jr. clearly is nothiding his views on some of the most important issues theCommission will face over the next few years. In an articlepublished in the Energy Law Journal, Hebert begins to tackle thequestion of how the Commission can “develop incentives that willspur the industry to act more competitively.”

Commissioner Curt Hebert Jr. said a decision in a Granite StateGas Transmission case this week signaled a “radical departure” inthe current policy used by the Commission to judge whether aproposed project has sufficient market demand. Since Order 636, theCommission has required pipelines and other companies to show thatmost, if not all, of a project’s capacity was under long-termcontracts to gain a certificate. “All of that changed [last week],”Hebert told NGI in an interview.