News

The recent rise in U.S. crude oil prices due to the announcedproduction cuts by the Organization of Petroleum ExportingCountries (OPEC) shouldn’t stop Congress from pursuing legislativereforms for domestic oil and natural gas producers, the head of anindependent producer association said yesterday.

Energy.Com and Columbia Gas of Ohio have teamed up to enableColumbia Gas customers to switch suppliers online from theEnergy.com web site as part of the utility’s customer choiceprogram. It marks Energy.com’s entrance into active deregulationenrollment services, the company said.

California regulators are scheduled to wrap up the formaldata-gathering phase of their assessment of the state’s natural gasmarkets with an oral argument March 23 in San Francisco. Using thisdata and the record from formal hearings conducted earlier thisyear, the California Public Utilities Commission will establish alist of the most promising options for injecting more competitioninto the state’s natural gas business, beginning next year. Thehalf-day hearing will divide 19 major parties into two discussionpanels: one focused on customer issues and the other oncompetitors. The three utilities will be represented on bothpanels.

Burlington Resources has joined forces with Enron Capital &Trade Resources Corp. in a gas gathering partnership that willserve the Wind River Basin in Wyoming, which has suffered fromprocessing and transportation constraints in recent years.

Cash market prices remained predominantly flat during Tuesday’strading session, mimicking a stagnant Nymex futures screen and heldfast by decreasing demand nationwide. Aside from major Northeasternmarkets, which almost doubled Monday’s declines, cash continuedflat to a penny lower at most trading points.

The leaders of the a major pipeline association and a keyelectric utility group jointly have expressed their support forFERC to convene a conference “in the near future” to assesspost-2000 natural gas demand in the Northeast and the need for newpipeline capacity to serve customers, particularly powergenerators, in that market.

Clinton administration officials met with major and independentproducers at the White House yesterday and assured them that ahigh-level group would be established to examine the conditionsthat are contributing to the depressed state of the oil and gasindustry.

A very divided FERC last week broke with a decade-old procedureby leapfrogging the preliminary determination (PD) step in fourcontroversial pipeline projects intended to carry Canadian gas fromthe U.S. Midwest to the Northeast gas market. Instead, it deferredaction on the fate of the projects until all of the environmentalreviews are completed – “hopefully” by early next fall. Projectsponsors had mixed reactions: they were disappointed by the breakwith PD procedure, but they also were encouraged by FERC’sassurance of a final vote by fall. And all said – at least publicly- they still planned to move forward with their separate projects,but sources said privately sponsors were re-evaluating whether itwas “worthwhile to go ahead.”

Coho Energy was notified by its lenders last week that it wasin default on an $89.6 million over-balance. The company failed tomake the first of five scheduled payments on the balance, whichresulted from an overall $239.6 million debt. The lenders reservedall rights, remedies and privileges as a result of the paymentdefault, but Coho said it expects to continue to discuss afinancing alternative with the bank group.