Insulated

While natural gas marketers overall registered an approximate 12% gain in volumes sold in NGI’s 1Q2008 marketer survey over year-ago totals, Constellation Energy Group, now fourth in the marketer listings, and Louis Dreyfus Energy Services LP, now in sixth place, reported remarkable sales volume gains of 54% and 68%, respectively. Shell Energy North America, Nexen Inc. and Tenaska Marketing Ventures all reported sales volume increases of more than 20%, while Chesapeake Energy Corp. and XTO Energy Inc. both had sales that were up by 32% over 1Q2007.

Indicative of how insulated it has remained from the energy industry’s financial meltdown, Sempra Energy’s Southern California Gas Co. utility unit based in Los Angeles was given an A+ rating by Standard & Poor’s Wednesday for a $250 million bond re-funding offering. SoCalGas’s bonds are rated the same as S&P’s rates Sempra’s corporate credit.