Eleventh

Given the events in Japan and last September’s fatal natural gas pipeline rupture in California, residents in and around California state’s capital are stirring up eleventh-hour doubts about a proposed underground gas storage facility south of their city. Some Sacramento residents will not accept a final environmental report listing as remote the chance of a leak or accident at the proposed facility.

Despite eleventh-hour negotiations, House and Senate leaders headed home for the November elections without reaching a compromise on legislation to open up more of the federal offshore to oil and natural gas leasing. The Republican leadership is expected to take up the issue of coastal drilling in the lame-duck session, which — depending on the outcome of the elections — could make a deal even more elusive.

Despite eleventh-hour negotiations, House and Senate leaders headed home for the November elections without reaching a compromise on legislation to open up more of the federal offshore to oil and natural gas leasing. The Republican leadership is expected to take up the issue of coastal drilling in the lame-duck session, which — depending on the outcome of the elections — could make a deal even more elusive.

A number of energy bills passed by the California legislature at the eleventh hour late last month sit in limbo with Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger remaining silent on whether he will sign the various bills into law.

A number of energy bills passed by the California legislature at the eleventh hour late last month sit in limbo with Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger remaining silence on whether he will sign the various bills into law.

In an eleventh-hour move designed to fashion a three-vote majority on the stalemated California Public Utilities Commission, Pacific Gas and Electric Co. and a leading utility consumer group, TURN, late Monday filed a revised plan for bringing the utility out of Chapter 11 bankruptcy with an investment-grade credit rating.

At literally the eleventh hour, Reliant Resources Inc. (RRI) last week successfully completed a $6.2 billion financing package to refinance $5.9 billion of existing bank credit facilities with new ones that won’t mature until 2007. The lenders also provided the cash-poor company a $300 million line of credit, which matures in 2004.

PG&E Corp.’s struggling National Energy Group (NEG) won an eleventh-hour, very short-term reprieve with a lenders’ syndicate Monday that will allow for the continued construction of new merchant electric generating plants in Arizona, Michigan and New York, all of which have had a pall cast over them for the past three months as NEG and its parent struggle to reorder the unit’s balance sheet through still undecided asset sales, reorganization and refinancings. The agreement is good through Nov. 14, after which lenders need to come up with a longer term solution.

Undeterred by am eleventh-hour cry of concern from a San Diego-area Congressman, the California State Lands Commission unanimously (3-0) voted to okay the California portion of the North Baja interstate natural gas pipeline that will serve two new power plants in Mexico, near the California-Mexican border. This clears the way for the U.S. portion of the project to begin construction in February. Construction in Mexico began last year.