Themselves

As the nation gears up for new leadership in Washington, natural gas and electricity companies find themselves in kind of a regulatory limbo as they await word on who will chair FERC in the Obama administration.

As the nation gears up for new leadership in Washington, natural gas and electricity companies find themselves in kind of a regulatory limbo as they await word on who will be FERC chairman in the Obama administration.

Discussions by the world’s leading natural gas exporters to form a “gas OPEC” lost momentum this week as some major producers disassociated themselves from the idea at a conference in Madrid, Dow Jones Newswires reported Wednesday.

With oil futures prices reaching a record $100/bbl on Wednesday and Thursday, power generators and other traditional natural gas users may soon find themselves competing with everyday drivers for the precious commodity, if NGVAmerica has anything to say about it.

With freezing overnight lows having settled themselves into the Midwest and Northeast at least temporarily and even some Southern cities dipping into the 30s, most points were able to rebound Monday from the previous Friday’s across the board losses.

Looking to give people in the energy industry and beyond a way to protect themselves from the billions of dollars in damage incurred during the overly active 2005 hurricane season, the Chicago Mercantile Exchange last week rolled out its CME-Carvill Hurricane Index futures and options. The underlying indexes will be calculated by Carvill, an independent reinsurance intermediary in specialty reinsurance that tracks and calculates hurricane activity.

Looking to give people in the energy industry and beyond a way to protect themselves from the billions of dollars in damage incurred during the overly active 2005 hurricane season, the Chicago Mercantile Exchange on Monday rolled out its CME-Carvill Hurricane Index futures and options. The underlying indexes will be calculated by Carvill, an independent reinsurance intermediary in specialty reinsurance that tracks and calculates hurricane activity.

With a “wild card” storage report looming Thursday morning (see Daily GPI, July 26), it appeared that traders were positioning themselves for the most bullish scenario as August natural gas futures tore higher on Wednesday, one day ahead of the contract’s expiration. The prompt month put in a $6.900 high late in the session before closing at $6.887, up 47.8 cents from Tuesday’s close.

Citing the demands of overseeing Enron Corp.’s complex bankruptcy, the directors who now run the defunct company voted pay increases for themselves that have at least doubled their compensation, and in one case, increased the pay sixfold.