Details

Duke/Fluor Daniel was awarded a turnkey contract Wednesday tobuild a 550 MW, $240 million cogeneration plant in Dearborn MI.Details of the contract were not disclosed.

Texaco said its fourth quarter 1998 results will include netspecial charges of about $350 million. “Continuing weak demand andsurplus supplies have driven crude oil, natural gas and refinedproduct prices sharply downward. In this low price environment, wewill be required to revalue inventories. We will also write-downoil and gas properties where remaining investments will not befully recovered,” said Texaco CFO Patrick J. Lynch.

Atlantic Richfield Co. (ARCO) told employees it will lay offworkers and cut its operating budget in anticipation of continuedlow oil prices. No details on the number of job cuts or where theywould be made were available. A company spokesman told NGI ARCOshould have a plan in place by mid to late October. ARCO has about20,000 employees, all but about 3,500 of them in the United States.

Union Pacific Resources Group announced details of itsparticipation in four successful wells recently completed on itsLand Grant acreage. UPR’s net production from the wells is about 28MMcf/d of gas and 500 barrels of oil/d. The most prolific well, theChamplin 457 A No. 5, is located in the Whitney Canyon field inUinta County, WY. The company owns a 33% net revenue interest inthe well which began producing at an initial rate of 60 MMcf/d.

Dramatic spot price changes are expected throughout the U.S.over the next two years following the construction of proposedmajor gas pipeline projects and development of gas reserves tosupport them. A new analysis released yesterday at GasMart Power’98, NGI’s annual energy conference, by ICF Kaiser focuses on howprices and volumes would shift following several likelydevelopments: the construction of Alliance Pipeline along withexpansions of Foothills/Northern Border, construction of the Vectorand Millennium projects to move gas from Chicago to East Coastmarkets, completion of the Sable Island project and associatedMaritimes and Northeast Pipeline moving gas down the East Coast andincreased gas production in the Gulf of Mexico.

A delayed and abridged trading windup in the March futures contract(see details in futures and news stories) Wednesday put a large crimpin the progress of bidweek activity, sources told Daily GPI. While tosome it was just an annoying wait, others complained of having totrade in the dark. A producer said the cash market had been renderedvery quiet by the phone outages that caused Nymex to shut down theexchange temporarily. “For a while we didn’t even know whether ourorders were filled,” he said. “It’s hard to take a cash position ifyou are unsure where your hedge lies.”