Frozen

Anticipated weekend blasts of cold (including the potential for frozen precipitation in parts of Louisiana and Texas) and the after-effects of a bullish storage report had more price-boosting impact Friday than many had expected.

After solidly predicting the Arctic cold front that has frozen New England (see NGI, Jan. 12), Joe Bastardi, senior meteorologist for AccuWeather.com, said last week that the region is not out of the woods yet.

The Federal Energy Regulatory Commission and the Commodity Futures Trading Commission (CFTC) were quite busy during the first year of the President’s Corporate Fraud Task Force, according to a White House fact sheet.

A Houston judge has frozen the assets of former executives with Rocky Mountain Energy Corp. (RMEC) after the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) alleged the company had illegally worked to manipulate its stock price. The SEC accused RMEC, its former CEO John Ehrman and former general counsel Roderick Johnson of an ongoing “pump and dump” scheme to raise the stock price, according to the complaint.

A Houston judge has frozen the assets of former executives with Rocky Mountain Energy Corp. (RMEC) after the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) alleged the company had illegally worked to manipulate its stock price.

Any skepticism over a “Siberian Express” arctic cold front making a stop in the Lower 48 has been frozen off and the only question left is just how long it will stay the central and eastern regions of the United States.

Huge resources of methane gas, trapped in frozen hydrates at thebottom of the oceans, are piquing the interests of researchersworldwide who estimate gas reserves in deep, frigid waters to be asmuch as 500 times larger than conventional gas reserves. With therecent enactment of the Methane Hydrate Act of 2000, passed byCongress and signed last week by President Clinton, more attentionis expected to be focused on these untapped reserves.