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Most sources were seeing bidweek prices running approximatelyflat Monday compared to the previous Friday, although a marketersaid some Southwest numbers were “up about a penny.” On the otherhand, a buyer who paid in the low $1.70s in the NGPL Midcontinentpool Friday said he was hearing of $1.69 deals Monday.

Washington attorney Katherine B. Edwards is among the candidatesbeing eyed by the Natural Gas Supply Association (NGSA) to succeedformer President Nicholas J. Bush, who departed the trade grouplast month amid allegations that he defrauded it of more than $2.4million, sources say.

A storage report considered bearish by most traders set thestage for softness in the cash market Thursday, then a plungingfutures screen virtually guaranteed cash declines. Sure enough,nearly every point fell between 5 and 8 cents. “We’re just tradingdown with the screen,” said a Western marketer.

Spirit Energy 76, Unocal Corp.’s U.S. Lower 48 exploration andproduction unit, signed a letter of intent to trade most of itsRocky Mountain oil and gas assets for 5.8 million shares of TomBrown Inc. and $5 million in cash. The total value of the deal isabout $76 million. Unocal will hold 16.52% of the outstandingcommon stock of Tom Brown based on the number of shares to beissued. The agreement also gives Unocal a seat on Tom Brown’s boardand the option to increase its ownership up to 19.5% through openmarket purchases.

While most of the Vector Pipeline project remains dormant,Vector Pipeline L.P. recently announced an open season forshort-term firm transportation service from its proposedinterconnect with Michigan Consolidated Gas at Belle River, MI, tothe Union Gas Ltd. system at Dawn, ON. The company also said itexpects final regulatory approval for the entire Chicago-to-Dawnproject from both the Canadian National Energy Board (NEB) and theU.S. Federal Energy Regulatory Commission (FERC) by early April.

Most oil and gas companies – 94% – report they expect to befully Y2K ready by next September, according to a survey that wasreleased yesterday at a conference of the oil and gas sectorworking group of the President’s Council on Year 2000 Conversion.

Despite strong performance by TransCanada’s transmissionbusiness, like most everyone else the company took a hit toyear-end earnings due to flagging commodity prices. TransCanadareported net earnings before unusual charges of $575 million 1998,down 8% from $620 million for fiscal 1997. Net earnings afterunusual charges, for the year ended Dec. 31, 1998 were $355 millioncompared to $522 million for the year ended Dec. 31, 1997.

Cash numbers ranged from flat to just over a nickel higher at afew points Thursday, and sources were nearly unanimous inattributing the upticks mostly to the example set by the Henry Hubfutures contract. In turn, they thought the screen strength derivedfrom the fairly hefty 203 Bcf figure in AGA’s Wednesday afternoonreport on storage withdrawals last week.

An announcement of the outcome of the merger talks between ExxonCorp. and Mobil Corp. is widely expected to occur today, with mostexpert industry-watchers anticipating the two energy behemoths willproduce a definitive deal, while a few say it’s still too close tocall.