Emerging

Going forward the restructured energy industry is going to have some unfamiliar names and faces and they’ll be operating with new ground rules, William Hobbs, president and CEO of Williams Energy Marketing and Trading told state regulators meeting in Chicago Tuesday.

Houston-based independent KCS Energy Inc. is slowly emergingfrom bankruptcy, completing the necessary steps to reorganize,announcing it has signed a production agreement with Enron NorthAmerica Corp. to sell about 17.3% of its oil and gas reserves overthe next five years for $176 million. KCS held nearly 277 Bcfe ofreserves in 2000.

New and improved drilling technology is turning out to be partof the answer to the emerging natural gas supply squeeze, at leastin Canada. Horizontal wells, developed initially for oil, increasethe accessibility, raise the productivity and cut the overall costsof tapping gas fields too, says a study by the National EnergyBoard, the Oil and Gas Commission of British Columbia and the B.C.Ministry of Energy.

New and improved drilling technology is turning out to be partof the answer to the emerging natural gas supply squeeze, at leastin Canada. Horizontal wells, developed initially for oil, increasethe accessibility, raise the productivity and cut the overall costsof tapping gas fields too, says a study by the National EnergyBoard, the Oil and Gas Commission of British Columbia and the B.C.Ministry of Energy.

As a footnote to the wide-ranging issues emerging fromCalifornia’s electricity wars this summer, the City of Los AngelesDepartment of Water and Power (LADWP) Tuesday paid a record $14million penalty to regional air quality regulators as a result ofrunning its older, more polluting LA Basin generating plantsfull-out this summer. The heavy penalty points up an increasinglytenuous situation for merchant generators who are running out ofways to avoid exceeding their plants’ air emission limits.

With a weaker screen during the morning and not a lot of solidweather load emerging from the weekend, most of the East was flatto down a few cents Monday. Western points continued a now-familiarpattern bracketing weekends: having suffered the biggest drops onFriday, they saw the biggest rebounds on Monday.

Infinity Inc., the largest oilfield services company in easternKansas and northeastern Oklahoma, and an emerging independent oiland gas producer, acquired a 100% working interest in an additional4,775 acres in Wyoming’s Green River Basin. The new acreage isadjacent to the recently announced property acquired by Infinityand gives the company an interest in a total of 20,595 gross acres.

Two major engine manufacturers have formed a “virtual company”to cash in on the emerging retail market for electricity in NorthAmerica.

Discoveries are approaching 1 Tcf in a southern portion of theNorthwest Territories, which is emerging as Canada’s hottest newnatural-gas drilling play, fanning flames under a simmeringregulatory and political dispute over pipeline service throughAlberta.