Recover

FERC on Monday rejected Natural Gas Pipeline Company of America’s (NGPL) request to capitalize the bulk of the costs that it will incur in a pipeline rehabilitation project aimed at mitigating stress corrosion cracking (SCC) on its system.

The offshore industry has taken more precautions to prepare for hurricane season, but as it continues to recover from last year, a stormy season could provide a “meaningful catalyst” for commodity prices, especially natural gas, Raymond James energy analysts said in their latest Stat of the Week.

Aquila Inc. said this week that it has received approval from the Iowa Utilities Board (IUB) for a 1.8% natural gas rate increase to recover the costs of investments made in the company’s natural gas transmission and distribution operations. With its last rate increase in 2003, the company pointed out that this increase is only its third in the last 13 years.

Kansas regulators on Monday approved a 2.4% rate increase settlement, or $2.7 million, for Aquila Inc. to recover the costs of investments that it made in the company’s natural gas transmission and distribution operations that service 104,000 customers in the state.

Dealing with the federal government on offshore leases will get more expensive under new fee schedules proposed to recover the costs of its services by the Minerals Management Service (MMS) in two recently issued notices of proposed rulemaking.

Dealing with the federal government on offshore leases will get more expensive under new fee schedules proposed to recover the costs of its services by the Minerals Management Service (MMS) in two recently issued notices of proposed rulemaking.

Natural gas futures on Tuesday fought to take back some of their Monday losses, but failed to scale the psychological $6 level. After reaching $5.99 just before 1 p.m. (EST), February natural gas retreated to settle at $5.902, preserving an 11.2-cent gain on the session.

Following the EIA’s slightly bearish storage report of a 76 Bcf build for the week ended May 7, the June natural gas futures contract plummeted 14.5 cents from the pre-storage release level of $6.47 to trade at $6.325 as of 11:10 a.m., leaving many market observers wondering how much further futures would fall.

The current crisis in the energy trading market largely will have blown over by the time 2003 rolls around, predicted John Olson Wednesday. He is probably best known as the industry analyst who suspected something was rotten in the state of Enron well before anyone else, earning himself an unfavorable reputation in the Enron executive suite prior to the company’s collapse.