Possibility

After warning of the possibility Wednesday, Florida Gas Transmission followed up by issuing an Overage Alert Day for market-area customers Thursday with a 20% tolerance for negative daily imbalances.

Tradition Energy analysts on Tuesday piled on to 2011 consensus outlook by several energy teams regarding U.S. natural gas prices. The possibility that prices may strengthen over the coming months appears “challenging,” they said.

Fort Worth, TX-based Quicksilver Resources Inc. — which makes a specialty of targeting unconventional reservoirs, including gas shales — said more than half of its capital budget for 2011 of $455 million will be spent in Texas.

As an aftereffect of the deadly San Bruno natural gas transmission pipeline blast in September, gas curtailments remain a possibility for Pacific Gas and Electric Co.’s (PG&E) largest customers in San Francisco and the peninsula region to the south, but a separate electricity milestone in the Bay Area Monday has helped ease that threat.

Shale gas so far has not impacted prices and supplies in the Pacific Northwest other than to make more remote the possibility of liquefied natural gas (LNG) imports and to increase the chances of exporting supplies from British Columbia (BC), Northwest Natural Gas Co. gas supply director Randy Friedman told the audience at “LDC Forum: Rockies and the West” conference Wednesday in Los Angeles.

Shale gas so far has not impacted prices and supplies in the Pacific Northwest other than to make more remote the possibility of liquefied natural gas (LNG) imports and to increase the chances of exporting supplies from British Columbia (BC), Northwest Natural Gas Co. gas supply director Randy Friedman told the audience at “LDC Forum: Rockies and the West” conference Wednesday in Los Angeles.

Republicans on the Senate Environment and Public Works Committee are mulling the possibility of boycotting the mark-up of climate change legislation (S. 1733) — a move that could hang the bill up in committee, a committee spokesman said.

As the Commodities Futures Trading Commission (CFTC) examines the possibility of imposing speculative position limits on “all commodities of finite supply,” the $4.4 billion United States Natural Gas Fund (UNG) moved to reduce its holdings of natural gas futures contracts and indicated that it may not continue to pursue its plans to expand its fund.

Breathing fresh life into the possibility of new coal-fired power plant development, U.S. Secretary of Energy Steven Chu late last week pledged that $2.4 billion from the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act will be used to expand and accelerate commercial deployment of carbon capture and storage (CCS) technology.