Half

Prices were still moving higher Friday, but at roughly half the pace of Thursday’s uprising. Overall, Friday’s increases ranged from about 8 to 20 cents. Gulf Coast numbers generally rose on either side of a dime, with moderately larger gains in the teens prevailing in other market areas. Most of the upticks above 15 cents were in the West.

Swiss-based investment banker UBS, which was recently given the green light by the U.S. Bankruptcy Court in New York to acquire Enron Corp.’s wholesale energy and marketing unit, apparently will trim 300 of its 800 jobs in the unit once the transaction is completed, according to UBS CEO Peter Wuffli.

Dominion East Ohio said on Wednesday that almost half of its customers have chosen other suppliers. Company officials said 583,997 (49%) of its 1.2 million customers have opted to purchase natural gas from alternative suppliers, realizing $86 million in savings in the first year of the system-wide Energy Choice program expansion.

Taking a page from its counterpart in the northern half of the state that is openly trying to avoid California regulation, San Diego-based Sempra Energy has updated its strategy to focus on a “Global Enterprises” group of businesses not regulated by their headquarters state, according to what Sempra senior executives have told financial and employee audiences in recent weeks.

An eleventh-and-a-half-hour attempt to enact state legislation to rescue Southern California Edison Co. from the jaws of bankruptcy seemed headed for failure at mid-afternoon Friday when the California lawmakers were attempting their rush toward adjournment for the year by midnight.

With the stimulus of the state’s electricity and natural gas crunch lingering, the pace of new natural gas well drilling in the northern half of California has nearly doubled over last year, according to state officials. Notices to drill new gas wells are coming in at a pace not seen since the mid-1980s, and the total for any single year in the 1990s will soon be surpassed.

The prospect of a 67.5% increase in gas demand in the state of New York over the next five years has the New York State Energy Research and Development Authority (NYSERDA) and the New York Independent System Operator (NYISO) just a little concerned about a potential overload of the gas transportation system in the state.

A little more than half of Destin Pipeline’s recent throughput of about 800 MMcf/d was cut Friday due to an outage of one of the processing trains at the BP Amoco-operated plant in Pascagoula, MS, according to a Destin spokesman. He said the train was expected to be returned to service by Saturday.

Based on data from the first half of the year, Raymond James Energy projects a North American production increase of 3% or 2.25 Bcf/d for 2001, including 1.5 Bcf/d of U.S. production and 0.75 Bcf/d from Canada. Going forward, that’s not likely to be enough and “it is likely that a certain amount of gas demand will need to be removed from the market, thereby setting the stage for higher long-term gas prices.” This bears out the group’s projection for long-term gas prices of between $3.50 and $5.50/MMBtu.