Support

Prices fell by amounts ranging from about a nickel to 20 cents in Friday’s trading. Most eastern declines were a dime or less, while drops in the teens tended to be concentrated in the West. The softening brought numbers at many eastern points back to the vicinity of first-of-month indexes; western prices, which never got back near indexes during last week’s moderate firmness Tuesday through Thursday, just fell further behind.

TransCanada PipeLines’ fast action last week in replacing its support for Millennium Pipeline — for the time being at least — with a less environmentally challenged new export route to the northeastern United States is just the latest action in the pipeline company’s campaign to drum up increased traffic or raise its rates to cover what it calls the costs of competition.

Piedmont Natural Gas said Monday it is not a party to the lawsuit filed by AGL Resources on behalf of gas marketer SouthStar Energy Services LLC against Dynegy Marketing and Trade. Piedmont (30%), AGL (50%) and Dynegy (20%) are partners in Southstar, which operates in Georgia under the trade name of Georgia Natural Gas Services.

Fresh off their success in not allowing natural gas to dip below major support on Monday, natural gas bulls reared their horns yesterday as they prodded prices to a constructive opening print. However, further advances were hard to come by, leaving the market to check mostly sideways for the rest of the session. The August contract closed at $3.165, a hike of 9.7 cents on the day.

A study done by FERC last February of California power generation plant outages was “not thorough enough” to support its finding that audited companies were not physically withholding power supply to drive up prices in the state, according to a new report by the General Accounting Office (GAO).

Democrats in the House of Representatives last Wednesday hit the ground running in their efforts to force consideration of energy price-cap legislation on to the House floor. Democrats, who need signatures from 218 members in order to move the price-cap bill sponsored by Rep. Jay Inslee (D-WA) directly to the House floor, had already collected more than half the required number of signatures as of last week.

While voicing continuing support for the state’s electricity recovery plan and the specific deal to sell San Diego’s utility transmission assets, Sempra Energy’s CEO last Thursday advocated more political reality and attention to expanding U.S. natural gas infrastructure in outlining his current views on California’s electricity crisis to business leaders attending a joint forecast of the economic impact from the power woes by UCLA’s Anderson School of Business and Cambridge Energy Research Associates (CERA).

Democrats in the House of Representatives yesterday hit the ground running in their efforts to force consideration of energy price-cap legislation on to the House floor. Democrats, who need signatures from 218 members in order to move the price-cap bill sponsored by Rep. Jay Inslee (D-WA) directly to the House floor, had already collected more than half the required number of signatures as of late Wednesday.

After a briefly checking below support at $4.00 and then back up into the low $4.10s, natural gas futures limped lazily sideways for much of the session Thursday as trade buying met almost equally with fund and local selling. At the closing bell the July contract was 7.4 cents lower for the session at $4.038. Estimated volume was relatively light, with only 67,994 contracts changing hands.