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Watershed areas serving New York City and Syracuse will be excluded from a pending generic environmental review for high-volume horizontal drilling for natural gas in the Marcellus shale formation because of issues related to the protection of drinking water supplies, the New York Department of Environmental Conservation (DEC) said.

Watershed areas serving New York City and Syracuse will be excluded from a pending generic environmental review for high-volume horizontal drilling for natural gas in the Marcellus shale formation because of issues related to the protection of drinking water supplies, the New York Department of Environmental Conservation (DEC) said Friday.

Watershed areas serving New York City and Syracuse will be excluded from a pending generic environmental review for high-volume horizontal drilling for natural gas in the Marcellus shale formation because of issues related to the protection of drinking water supplies, the New York Department of Environmental Conservation (DEC) said Friday.

The Commodity Futures Trading Commission said Walt Lukken will leave the agency effective July 10 after serving nearly seven years as commissioner and as chairman since January. He plans to join NYSE Euronext as senior vice president of global market structure in its office of general counsel.

In a move that would create a $595 million combined energy company serving 200,000 customers in three states, Chesapeake Utilities Corp. (CPK) and Florida Public Utilities Co. (FPU) said Monday they have agreed to merge FPU with a CPK subsidiary.

SCANA Energy has won a competitive bid to continue serving as Georgia’s sole regulated provider of natural gas for special groups, the Georgia Public Service Commission (PSC) said Tuesday.

The U.S. Supreme Court is the next stop for former Enron Corp. CEO Jeffrey Skilling after a circuit court in New Orleans rejected his appeal. Skilling is serving a 24-year prison term after he was convicted in 2006 on 19 counts of conspiracy, securities fraud and insider trading. Although a three-judge panel of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit ordered Skilling’s sentence to be reviewed, the panel denied the appeal in January (see NGI, Jan. 26). Skilling’s defense team then requested an en banc hearing, in which the appeal would be heard by the entire circuit court. The full circuit court rejected the request without comment. Daniel Petrocelli, who is in charge of Skilling’s defense team, said he now will ask the Supreme Court to consider the appeal. “There is an irreconcilable conflict among the circuits on the primary theory of criminality used in Jeff’s case, and now against many others,” Petrocelli said. Petrocelli specifically wants the high court to consider whether Skilling robbed Enron of his “honest services” by using fraudulent methods to achieve corporate goals. The prosecution argued that point successfully in Skilling’s case. However, several other Enron-related convictions that had used that theory have been successfully appealed. In the successful appeals, the courts have ruled that the “honest services” argument did not apply to lower-level Enron executives or third parties because they had not stolen, taken bribes or taken property from Enron. In Skilling’s case, the circuit court in New Orleans said the prosecution could argue that Skilling had robbed Enron of “honest services.” As CEO, said the court, Skilling set a “fraudulent agenda” for staff, which in turn carried out his agenda at his request.

The three major natural gas distribution utilities serving Oregon told a workshop for state energy officials and stakeholders Tuesday to expect retail natural gas prices to increase this winter in the range of 10-40%, with the state’s biggest distributor predicting hikes in the 35-40% range.

Production growth in the Raton Basin has prompted El Paso Corp.’s Colorado Interstate Gas Co. (CIG) to expand its transmission system serving the basin. CIG’s Raton Expansion would add 130 MMcf/d of incremental firm capacity from the Las Animas County, CO, area northward along the Front Range of Colorado to the Cheyenne Hub.