Risk

Stone Energy Corp. plans to reduce its exploration exposure and focus on lower-risk exploitation projects. The company, jilted in a scuttled merger earlier this year, is not seeking a merger partner at this time, management said Wednesday.

A potentially big risk — new native taxation — has been taken out of Canada’s arctic natural gas pipeline project. The Northwest Territories and federal governments teamed up to assure the C$7.5 billion (US$6.75 billion) Mackenzie Gas Project that demands for aboriginal property taxes are nonstarters.

Given the billions of dollars that are being invested to import liquefied natural gas (LNG) into the United States, Alaska runs the risk of being “marginalized” as a source for gas supplies to meet domestic demand, FERC said last Monday in its second report to Congress on the Alaska gas pipeline.

In a move that essentially keeps all of the major energy suppliers in California during the wholesale market meltdown in 2000-2001 at risk in pending litigation, California Superior Court Judge Ronald Prager in San Diego County ruled Tuesday against Dallas-based TXU Corp.’s contention that it should not be included in a series of 27 civil cases that have been consolidated in the judge’s court. Prager oversaw the multi-billion-dollar class action lawsuit against Sempra Energy and its two California natural gas utilities that was settled earlier in the year in the midst of a jury trial.

Given the billions of dollars that are being invested to import liquefied natural gas (LNG) into the United States, Alaska runs the risk of being “marginalized” as a source for gas supplies to meet domestic demand, FERC said Monday in its second report to Congress on the progress being made on an Alaska gas pipeline.

Agreeing with the intent of lowering financial risk and raising credit ratings, the Idaho Public Utilities Commission Wednesday approved Avista Corp.’s proposal to reorganize, creating a still-to-be-renamed holding company for Avista Utilities, which serves electricity and natural gas customers in northern Idaho. The PUC noted that last year’s repeal of the federal Public Utility Holding Company Act (PUHCA) allows multi-state utilities like Avista to form holding companies.

The former chief accounting officer of Enron Corp.’s wholesale energy trading operations testified Monday he transferred millions of dollars of reserves from the unit in 2000 to help the company top Wall Street’s earnings forecasts.

Chevron Corp. and Anadarko Petroleum announced a new deepwater discovery at their Big Foot prospect in Walker Ridge Block 29 about 225 miles south of New Orleans. The companies expect that the oil discovery also will provide associated natural gas production but no commercial estimates have been made available yet.

Urging market participants to move beyond the traditional risk management tools when trading natural gas futures, Tom Saal, of Commercial Brokerage Corp., said Wednesday that it is important to develop new techniques for identifying price trends and market timing. One pretty good way of identifying a “buy” signal recently has been simply observing how short the funds, or noncommercial traders, are.