Heretofore

The House Resources Committee on Monday introduced a compromise bill that would open up heretofore closed portions of the Outer Continental Shelf (OCS) to oil and gas drilling and would give states a greater share of the royalty pie from offshore production.

In an indication of how El Paso Corp. intends to turn around its troubled and heretofore U.S.-centered oil and gas production business, subsidiary El Paso Production Co. announced late Monday that it will purchase the rest of a joint oil and natural gas operation that it operates in Brazil with Unocal Corp.

An Indiana case that confronts the issue of whether regulatingheretofore FERC-jurisdictional pipeline laterals should be sharedwith states has yielded somewhat conflicting decisions at theregulatory level so far. As a result, the potentiallyprecedent-setting issue seems destined for resolution by state andfederal appellate courts.