Unprecedented

Canada has far and away surpassed 2001’s record level of natural gas well completions, but the unprecedented number has only modestly increased overall production, according to a report by Dallas-based Southwest Securities.

Canada has far and away surpassed 2001’s record level of natural gas well completions, but the unprecedented number has only modestly increased overall production, according to a report by Dallas-based Southwest Securities.

While it remains unclear what exactly caused last month’s unprecedented blackout in the U.S. and Canada, a wide-ranging group of stakeholders last week said that if Congress is serious about preventing a similar catastrophe from happening again, federal lawmakers must make currently voluntary reliability standards mandatory for the power industry.

With an unprecedented qualifier, the California state Senate proposal (SB 888) for re-regulating the state’s electricity industry Thursday received a bare majority of support to move on to the lower house Assembly, but only after it was labeled as a proposal that was for “display purposes only.”

In an unprecedented show of support for accurate natural gas price indices, the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission last week issued an order requiring 11 major energy companies, many of whom have publicly admitted providing false data to trade publications that publish indices, to prove that they have changed their ways. They must either demonstrate that they have installed controls to prevent any attempt at price index manipulation in the future, or show that they have exited the wholesale gas marketing and trading business entirely.

California regulators Thursday unanimously initiated a two-phase investigation of the causes for the unprecedented wholesale natural gas price spikes at the Arizona-California border in a 14-month period covering March 2000 through May 2001. The effort is designed to be supplementary to the proceedings already underway at the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission regarding the border prices and the alleged role of El Paso Natural Gas and its affiliates in driving up those prices in the midst of the state’s energy crisis.

In an unprecedented move Thursday, the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission said it will reassert jurisdiction over the portion of the North Padre Island (NPI) unregulated gathering facilities that Transcontinental Gas Pipe Line spun down to its gathering affiliate, Williams Field Services Co. (WFS). The Commission took this action after finding Transco and WFS “acted in concert” to push gathering rates to monopolistic levels on the NPI offshore Texas facilities and to frustrate effective FERC regulation of Transco’s interstate transportation system.

In an unprecedented move Thursday, the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission said it will reassert jurisdiction over the portion of the North Padre Island (NPI) unregulated gathering facilities that Transcontinental Gas Pipe Line spun down to its gathering affiliate, Williams Field Services Co. (WFS). The Commission took this action after finding Transco and WFS “acted in concert” to push gathering rates to monopolistic levels on the NPI offshore Texas facilities and to frustrate effective FERC regulation of Transco’s interstate transportation system.

In a sweeping unprecedented move Wednesday, the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission ordered more than 140 suppliers and affiliates to furnish information on whether they engaged in Enron-like strategies to manipulate energy trading during the height of the California energy crisis in 2000-2001. The agency, in short, wants sellers to western markets to “admit or deny” under sworn oath whether they unfairly gamed the market.