Prohibition

A citizens group is calling on Murrysville, PA, to ban hydraulic fracturing (fracking) in the borough, located about 20 miles east of Pittsburgh in Westmoreland County.

FERC last Thursday approved a request by the U.S. affiliates of Norway’s Statoil ASA and Russia’s Gazprom for a waiver of the agency’s prohibition on tying capacity releases to “extraneous conditions” — which could help to expand the companies’ liquefied natural gas (LNG) footprint in the United States.

The Federal Energy Regulatory Commission Thursday approved a request by the U.S. affiliates of Norway’s Statoil ASA and Russia’s Gazprom for a waiver of the agency’s prohibition on tying capacity releases to “extraneous conditions” — which could help to expand the companies’ liquefied natural gas (LNG) footprint in the United States.

The Federal Energy Regulatory Commission Thursday approved a request by the U.S. affiliates of Norway’s Statoil ASA and Russia’s Gazprom for a waiver of the agency’s prohibition on tying capacity releases to “extraneous conditions” — which could help to expand the companies’ liquefied natural gas (LNG) footprint in the United States.

President Bush is expected to sign a $630 billion continuing resolution that allows a decades-old moratorium on offshore oil and natural gas drilling, as well as a prohibition on oil shale development in the Intermountain West that is set to expire Tuesday at midnight.

Congress needs to take steps to regulate all natural gas commodity markets equally, impose a limit on traders’ positions, enforce the statutory prohibition against excessive speculation and give the Commodity Futures Trading Commission (CFTC) a bigger budget to prevent a replay of the Amaranth hedge fund collapse last year, which took a major toll on consumers, said the chairman of the Senate Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations last Monday.

Congress needs to take steps to regulate all natural gas markets equally, impose a limit on traders’ positions, enforce the statutory prohibition against excessive speculation and give the Commodity Futures Trading Commission (CFTC) a bigger budget to prevent a replay of the Amaranth hedge fund collapse last year, which took a major toll on consumers, said the chairman of the Senate Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations Monday.