Features

Coming to grips with the new natural gas market landscape that features plenty of supply thanks to bountiful shale production and lackluster demand due to the current prolonged economic rut, some natural gas and electric utilities across the country are presenting their customers with early holiday gifts in the form of lower energy bills.

Enterprise Products Partners LP’s $1.5 billion, 270-mile Acadian Haynesville Extension pipeline has entered service, linking producers in the Haynesville/Bossier shale play with new markets.

The oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico has “complicated” the passage of an energy bill because one of its “central features” was to be offshore access, Anadarko Petroleum Corp. CEO Jim Hackett said Tuesday.

Canada’s arctic gas project includes adaptations to future global warming, and the sponsors say more climate change features may be added, but they will not prepare for environmental critics’ worst-case, doomsday climate change scenarios.

Dominion announced Thursday that it closed on a $1.45 billion revolving credit facility with JP Morgan that features a unique pricing mechanism, called relative value pricing, which adjusts interest payments based on reference to bond market pricing. Dominion and JP Morgan said they expect the new financing method to “win widespread popularity…attract more lenders to the market and serve as a model for future unsecured short-term credit for investment grade companies.”

The 40 cents-plus screen spike of the day before was the most frequently cited factor in Tuesday’s muscle-flexing cash market, but rising temperatures in the South, storage injection demand and the end of a Rockies transportation constraint also drew mention. Double-digit gains ruled the day at most points, accompanied by triple-digit rebounds for CIG, Cheyenne Hub, Questar and San Juan-Bondad. Significant nuclear outages, while little changed from before, also helped bolster gas prices.

Caught between bearish weather forecasts and slightly supportive technical features Friday, natural gas futures took the path of least resistance and shuffled mostly sideways to close out the week. The January contract settled at $2.568, up 0.3 cents for the session, but down 13.3 cents for the week. Estimated volume confirmed the quiet trading activity as only 65,069 contracts changed hands.

Key features of the House omnibus energy bill that would offer producers royalty relief and expand leasing opportunities would cost the federal government as much as $462 million over the next decade.

Koch Energy Trading’s new web site KochEnergy.com went live yesterday, offering awide range of features and in-depth information to select Kochcustomers.