Recognizing

Recognizing potential adverse impacts on oil and natural gas operations and explorers, Governor Sean Parnell on Thursday vetoed Senate Bill 305, legislation that would have decoupled Alaska’s petroleum taxes through separate levies on oil and gas production.

The Los Angeles County Board of Supervisors honored Sempra Energy’s Southern California Gas Co., recognizing the utility’s recent top national ranking for customer service by J.D. Power. SoCalGas ranked highest for customer satisfaction among natural gas utilities in the western United States and scored highest nationwide in the latest J.D. Power study, which determined the ranking by interviewing more than 12,000 customers. The ranking looks at six criteria: company image, price and value, communications, billing and payments, customer service, and field services. The gas utility — the nation’s largest — came out on top among all 56 large natural gas utilities in the study, the county resolution noted.

As if finally recognizing that they’ve been coasting higher recently in the face of fairly weak seasonal demand, prices yielded to bearish fundamentals Tuesday in posting declines ranging from 1-2 cents at a couple of western points to 15 cents or so. Most losses were around a dime. Transwestern-Permian was an aberration with a small gain.

Recognizing that they are basically treading on federal turf, California state legislators are trying to determine exactly what, if anything, to do as a result of last week’s energy oversight committee hearings on the issue of the inflated California-Arizona natural gas border prices, according to staff members for the elected officials. An answer may not come until next month when a written report by the oversight committee is completed.

Recognizing the need for more high-deliverability storage to support the rapid growth of gas-fired power generation in Texas, Falcon Gas Storage acquired a second storage facility in the state, with plans to increase cycling capabilities and connect the facility to the main Texas pipeline grid. The Hill-Lake natural gas storage facility is located about 100 miles west of Dallas/Fort Worth in Eastland County. Falcon purchased rights to the plant from TXU Lone Star Pipeline.

Recognizing that energy consumers are likely to experience priceshocks for natural gas, electricity and heating oil this winter,Senate and House lawmakers last week began calling on Congress andthe Clinton administration to work cooperatively to open up morepublic lands to exploration and drilling, provide tax incentivesfor producers (especially marginal well operators) and to consideroptions that would make a broader mix of fuels (other than naturalgas) attractive to the electric generation market.

Recognizing the inevitability of heightened gas demand from theNortheast generation market over the next 20 years, a Department ofEnergy (DOE) study released last week calls for an acceleration ofthe FERC certificate process to pave the way for more gas pipelineand storage capacity to the region to help reduce its singulardependence on home heating oil and to avoid recurrences of lastwinter’s heating oil price spikes.

While recognizing that congested areas in part of California’senergy grid need a combination of potential mitigation measures,including distributed generation, the serious discussion at astatewide energy roundtable last week remained ambivalent about howfast, and whether, the decentralized approach can make a meaningfulcontribution.

While recognizing that congested areas in part of California’senergy grid need a combination of potential mitigation measures,including distributed generation, the serious discussion at astatewide energy roundtable last week remained ambivalent about howfast, and whether, the decentralized approach can make a meaningfulcontribution.