Midwest

Weekend winter storms in much of the Midcontinent/Midwestcombined with expectations of even worse to come this week over amuch wider area to push cash prices higher by well over a dollar atnearly all points. Only the PG&E citygate was a tad shy ofrealizing a three-digit advance.

Mountain Energy Corp., a Midwest gas marketer that has beendeluged with legal actions from suppliers and customers who claimthey were cheated out of millions of dollars, filed a consent orderthis week in a Missouri federal court in which it agreed not tocontest efforts to force it into Chapter 7 bankruptcy.

Powder River Basin gas producers may be about to get a moredirect route to Midwest markets. Northern Border Pipeline hasreleased plans to build a new 325-mile greenfield pipeline fromMcCabe, MT, to Gillette, WY, to tap the rapidly growing productionin the Powder River, which is estimated to hold between 10 and 30Tcf of gas.

Powder River Basin gas producers may be about to get a moredirect route to Midwest markets. Northern Border Pipeline hasreleased plans to build a new 325-mile greenfield pipeline fromMcCabe, MT, to Gillette, WY, to tap the rapidly growing productionin the Powder River, which is estimated to hold between 10 and 30Tcf of gas.

Mountain Energy Corp., the Midwest gas marketer that has beenbesieged by lawsuits and a petition seeking to force it intobankruptcy, has notified its customers in Kansas and Missouri thatit will stop supplying them with natural gas after Oct. 31.

The legal problems of Mountain Energy Corp., a Midwest gasmarketer that has been accused of defrauding customers andsuppliers out of millions of dollars, are mounting.

Mountain Energy Corp., a Midwest gas marketer, said yesterday ithas had to ask about 10% of its customers to change theirfixed-priced supply contracts to index-based arrangements for theremainder of their contracts due to a “major dispute” with AnadarkoEnergy Services over the “hedging of our accounts.”

Banking on a growing customer base in the upper Midwest,Milwaukee-based Wisconsin Energy Corp. this week unveiled a broad10-year, $6 billion manifesto to construct new power generationunits, refurbish or replace old facilities, improve itsdistribution system, cut its quarterly common stock dividend by50%, and double its share repurchase program.

Alliant Energy Resources Inc. announced plans last week topartner with Corn Products International Inc., a major cornrefiner, to build a 750 MW “co-generation” facility near Chicago,IL. The plant, which will be called Argo Power LLC, will produceenough electricity to serve 225,000 average homes when completed inthree years.