Inevitable

What has seemed inevitable for most of this year happened Friday with the announcement by Southern California Edison Co. (SCE) that it plans to retire its trouble-riddled San Onofre Nuclear Generating Station (Songs) along the Southern California coast. Utility and state energy officials increasingly have been planning for the loss of the region’s major baseload power source for some time (see Daily GPI, May 29).

While this is “out of my area of expertise, I think…it’s inevitable that natural gas is going to be a world commodity, and that because of very substantial price differentials between the price in this country and the prices in Europe and Asia it will happen,” FERC Chairman Jon Wellinghoff said during a roundtable briefing with reporters last week at the agency’s headquarters in Washington, DC.

While this is “out of my area of expertise, I think…it’s inevitable that natural gas is going to be a world commodity, and that because of very substantial price differentials between the price in this country and the prices in Europe and Asia it will happen,” FERC Chairman Jon Wellinghoff said during a roundtable briefing with reporters at the agency’s headquarters in Washington, DC.

In the article “TransCanada: Marcellus-Backed Flow Reversal Is Inevitable” (see NGI, Feb. 27), NGI incorrectly stated that Union Gas is working on plans for a new import route from New York State to its Dawn storage and trading hub in southern Ontario. Union Gas in fact has no plans for a competitive pipeline with an import route from New York State to Dawn. The company says it has discussed the need for an expansion of pipeline capacity east of Parkway to Maple to relieve a transportation bottleneck on this corridor, and it continues to believe an expansion of this path is required. NGI regrets the error.

A historic reversal of natural gas flows between Canada and the United States is inevitable, TransCanada Corp. says. The company is urging acceptance of its plan to make the switch with its own natural gas Mainline between Alberta and Ontario as the lesser of two evils.

In the article “TransCanada: Marcellus-Backed Flow Reversal Is Inevitable” (see Daily GPI, Feb. 27), NGI incorrectly stated that Union Gas is working on plans for a new import route from New York State to its Dawn storage and trading hub in southern Ontario. Union Gas in fact has no plans for a competitive pipeline with an import route from New York State to Dawn. The company says it has discussed the need for an expansion of pipeline capacity east of Parkway to Maple to relieve a transportation bottleneck on this corridor, and it continues to believe an expansion of this path is required. NGI regrets the error.

A historic reversal of natural gas flows between Canada and the United States is inevitable, TransCanada Corp. says. The company is urging acceptance of its plan to make the switch with its own natural gas Mainline between Alberta and Ontario as the lesser of two evils.

The “perma-bulls” at Raymond James & Associates Inc. have dialed back their assumptions for the U.S. natural gas rig count and giving in to the inevitable: low prices are taking down rigs in the gas patch. The good news: there’s “blistering” growth for oil and liquids drillers.

Producers were tight-lipped on Tuesday about whether natural gas shut-ins have begun, but energy analysts say it’s inevitable, given weak prices and a growing list of storage-related operational flow orders (OFO).