Steps

Alaska’s Point Thomson leaseholders have offered the state a series of steps they will take by 2013 to develop the long-dormant North Slope gas field, which the state has been trying to reclaim in court.

The Canadian government has taken steps to protect and conserve Canada’s north by announcing the withdrawal of more than 10 million hectares (27 million acres) of land from development in the Northwest Territories (NWT). The conservation initiative, one of the largest in the country’s history, will protect an area that extends from near the East Arm of Great Slave Lake and around the Ramparts River and Wetlands.

Two liquefied natural gas (LNG) import terminals planned on the Pacific Coast of British Columbia took important steps forward last week. One day after the Kitimat LNG project, which would be built on an Indian reserve near Kitimat, BC, received environmental approval, another BC LNG project, the C$350 million Prince Rupert LNG terminal proposed by WestPac LNG Corp., initiated the regulatory review process.

Congress needs to take steps to regulate all natural gas commodity markets equally, impose a limit on traders’ positions, enforce the statutory prohibition against excessive speculation and give the Commodity Futures Trading Commission (CFTC) a bigger budget to prevent a replay of the Amaranth hedge fund collapse last year, which took a major toll on consumers, said the chairman of the Senate Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations last Monday.

Congress needs to take steps to regulate all natural gas markets equally, impose a limit on traders’ positions, enforce the statutory prohibition against excessive speculation and give the Commodity Futures Trading Commission (CFTC) a bigger budget to prevent a replay of the Amaranth hedge fund collapse last year, which took a major toll on consumers, said the chairman of the Senate Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations Monday.

The Federal Trade Commission (FTC) last Wednesday took steps to block Equitable Resources Inc.’s proposed acquisition of Dominion Peoples (see NGI, March 6, 2006), saying the merger would create a natural gas monopoly in certain areas of Allegheny County, PA, especially Pittsburgh.

The Federal Trade Commission (FTC) Wednesday took steps to block Equitable Resources Inc.’s proposed acquisition of Dominion Peoples (see Daily GPI, March 3, 2006), saying the merger would create a natural gas monopoly in certain areas of Allegheny County, PA, especially Pittsburgh.

In anticipation of FERC’s Friday technical conference on market transparency, the American Gas Association (AGA) has recommended that the federal regulatory agency take steps to improve the public confidence in the markets by establishing a system that would mandate the reporting of fixed-price trades by all market participants to publishers of price indexes.

Maintaining Monday’s momentum, August natural gas on Tuesday climbed to a high of $5.850 before retracing most of its steps in the afternoon. Despite the morning run-up, the prompt month settled at $5.633, up only 2.5 cents from Monday’s close.