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Range Resources and FirstEnergy announced last week the officialbeginning to their $200 million Appalachian joint venture, GreatLakes Energy Partners. The equal partnership combines all of bothcompanies’ oil and gas assets in the region.

Western Resources Inc. and Kansas City Power and Light (KCPL) -could be reaching the end of their long-fought merger battle as theKansas Corporation Commission (KCC) approved the merger with someconditions.

Analysts are escalating their spot gas price forecasts but it’snot the oft-cited storage fill that’s driving them.

Boston-based BEC Energy and Commonwealth Energy System completedtheir merger into $4.5 billion NSTAR last Wednesday – one day afterwinning approval for the transaction from the Securities andExchange Commission.

Swing prices continued their downhill slide Friday, succumbingto the normal drop in weekend demand, a softer screen and lack offresh storm news. Except for Midwest citygates, where a warmingtrend was developing, virtually all eastern points fell by a dimeor more. Waha and the Permian Basin also experienced dime-plusdeclines, but other western points tended to fall only a nickel orso. Sources attributed the West’s relative firmness to heavy airconditioning and agricultural load in California and other states.

Analysts are escalating their spot gas price forecasts, but it’snot the oft-cited storage fill that’s driving them.

Boston-based BEC Energy and Commonwealth Energy System completedtheir merger into $4.5 billion NSTAR Wednesday – one day afterwinning approval for the transaction from the Securities andExchange Commission.

During Sept. 7-11 maintenance on its Topock (AZ) Lateral andrelated facilities, Transwestern expects no flows to either SoCalGas or PG&E at their Topock interconnects. However, thepipeline said it is investigating “limited alternative deliveryarrangements” for the two points. It will be able to schedule up to300,000 MMBtu/d at Mojave Pipeline’s Topock interconnect.

Devon Energy Corp. and PennzEnergy Co. completed their merger,which was announced May 20. Shareholders of both companies approvedthe deal Tuesday. More than 99% of the shares represented at theDevon meeting were cast in favor of the merger. Of the sharesrepresented at the PennzEnergy meeting, about 92% were cast infavor of the merger.