Significant

A large majority of points softened Monday as significant heating load was generally scarce and winter term deals along with sparse use of storage were able to meet many buyers’ needs.

The mayor of Albany, NY, has vetoed an ordinance that would have banned hydraulic fracturing (fracking) within the city limits on the grounds that the state Department of Environmental Conservation (DEC) has not finalized its actions over the practice.

A significant amount of previously leased acreage will be included in Alaska’s North Slope oil and gas lease sale in December, the Alaska Department of Natural Resources (DNR) said. Due to lease expirations and other administrative actions, an additional 200,000 acres are to be available in the vicinity of Point Thomson and in the Beaufort Sea.

El Paso Corp.’s Tennessee Gas Pipeline Co. (TGP) has struck two long-term contracts for service on its MPP project, which is intended to improve takeaway capacity from the Marcellus Shale through expansion of TGP’s 300 Line in Pennsylvania.

The boom in natural gas shale exploration and production (E&P) is fueling “significant cost advantages” for North America’s commodity chemicals producers because the costs of gas and oil-based feedstocks remain far apart, according to a report by Fitch Ratings.

A UK-based exploration company whose management team has unconventional exploration experience in the United States claims to have discovered a natural gas shale field near Blackpool, in Lancashire, England, that may rival rock in the United States.

As sources had expected, the nearly stationary presence of a production-disrupting tropical depression off the Louisiana coast was outweighed by the impending significant reduction of air conditioning load in much of the market and the extra decline of industrial demand associated with a holiday weekend. The result was falling prices at nearly all points Friday.

When voters in New Brunswick went to the polls last September, they were still fuming over the incumbent Liberal government’s failed attempt to sell the province’s public utility. Premier David Alward and the Progressive Conservative party were able to harness that dissatisfaction and won the 2010 election in a landslide.

Southern said further investigation found “significant internal damage” at Hall Gate Compressor Station, and while a repair plan is being developed, the return to service date of the facility is unknown. The pipeline also said personnel were reviewing required maintenance plans at other stations in the area in an effort to minimize any further capacity impacts. For now no FT impact was anticipated and no service reductions as a result of the Hall Gate outage due to requirements exceeding capacity of an upstream compressor station have occurred. However, reductions of up to 50,000 Dth/d of available interruptible service could occur if system conditions change, Southern said.