Importance

Anyone who doubts the growing importance of onshore unconventional natural gas basins should take a look at second quarter results from EOG Resources Inc. and Southwestern Energy Co. Both companies credit prolific shale production — EOG’s in the Barnett and Southwestern’s in the Fayetteville — for strong results last quarter.

The National Association of Regulatory Utility Commissioners (NARUC), noting the importance of increasing natural gas supplies, passed a resolution at its summer meeting Wednesday encouraging cooperation of state and federal agencies in the siting of LNG regasification terminals.

Traditional natural gas supplies will not keep pace with demand in the long term, and more U.S. companies likely will turn to the global liquefied natural gas (LNG) market in the years to come, a Northeast utility executive said in Houston Tuesday.

Traditional natural gas supplies will not keep pace with demand in the long term, and more U.S. companies likely will turn to the global liquefied natural gas (LNG) market in the years to come, a Northeast utility executive said in Houston Tuesday.

Noting the “growing relevance and importance to investors and lenders,” Moody’s Investors Service announced Thursday it will expand its research and analysis in several areas of corporate credit analysis. The credit ratings service said it would apply “greater analytical focus and commit additional resources to its analysis and published research on the quality of financial accounting and the transparency of corporate disclosure, corporate governance issues, and risk management and derivatives issues related to credit.”

Although the utility quickly discounted the importance of it, the California utility consumer watchdog group TURN (The Utility Reform Network) gained a temporary stay last week from a federal appeals court to the court-approved settlement between state regulators and Southern California Edison Co. TURN asked the 9th Circuit Court of Appeals to stay an Oct. 5 judgment by a federal district court judge in Los Angeles.

In the ever-changing climate of energy deregulation, portfoliomanagement tools, such as weather hedging and storage control, arebecoming more vital, a panel of industry experts said Thursday atthe LDC Forum Conference in Boston, MA.