Touches

Legislators in the Pennsylvania General Assembly are scrambling to put the finishing touches on a tax code bill that could potentially offer billions in a tax break to companies in exchange for investing billions in an ethane cracker and associated manufacturing facilities.

Democratic negotiators on Capitol Hill are putting the finishing touches on a final energy bill that lawmakers could take up as early as this week, congressional aides said.

Democratic negotiators on Capitol Hill are putting the finishing touches on a final energy bill that lawmakers could take up as early as next week, congressional aides are reporting.

The North American Electric Reliability Council (NERC) within the next month and a half intends to complete a written policy that will allow the council to hand over to FERC information related to power reliability violations, the head of NERC told a Senate hearing last week.

At least a few traders likely were surprised to see how relatively firm prices stayed Tuesday. A few Gulf Coast points fell 1-3 cents or so, but otherwise, quotes ranged from flat to up as much as a quarter in the Rockies. Gains of a nickel or less tended to dominate the market.

With continued support from energy futures and touches of winter-like weather starting to show up in some areas, cash prices rose across the board Monday and skyrocketed in most cases. Rockies/San Juan gains of 20-30 cents or so were small only in comparison with upticks of around 40 cents or more in the rest of the market.

The Department of Energy (DOE) is putting the finishing touches on a national transmission grid study that, among other things, recognizes improved regional planning as a tool for removing transmission bottlenecks, Vicky Bailey, assistant secretary of energy for policy and international affairs at the DOE, told a gathering of electric utility executives last Wednesday at a transmission summit in Washington, DC.

Ending a two-day slide, natural gas futures snapped back to lifeFriday as traders were drawn back to the long side of the market bysupportive technicals and stronger weekend cash prices. In just itssecond day as the prompt contract, May advanced 7.2 cents to finishat $2.945, just a penny off its high for the day and just 6 centsof its all-time high notched last Tuesday.

Putting the finishing touches on a controversial asset sell-offplan, MCN Energy Group Inc. announced last week the sale of itsAppalachian natural gas exploration and production (E&P) andrelated pipeline properties for a total of about $180 million.