Went

After closing down 16.8 cents at $5.765 on Thursday, the natural gas futures May contract went for a run Friday morning, notching a high of $5.920 in morning trading, before settling down to close at $5.812, up 4.7 cents on the day.

El Segundo, CA-based Unocal Corp. said Wednesday that it has yet to locate an Era Aviation helicopter that went missing Tuesday night around 7:15 p.m. CST. The producer lost contact with the Sikorsky S76 helicopter while it was en route to a drilling location in the Gulf of Mexico.

Bellevue, WA-based Puget Sound Energy (PSE) reported Tuesday that a bad investment in a venture capital fund for energy start-ups lowered its 2003 earnings by $4 million.

Although natural gas and electricity deliveries went off pretty much without a hitch in the subzero Northeast region last week, key House lawmakers used the situation as a soapbox to call for the “obstructionist senators” to pass the ominbus energy bill (HR 6) when Congress returns this week.

Northwest cautioned shippers Tuesday “to purchase adequate gas supplies and not to draft the pipeline during the upcoming weekend.” It went on to note that market-area weather had been cold for the previous few days, and that “extremely cold temperatures” were predicted to begin Sunday (Jan. 4). For last Tuesday’s gas day, withdrawals from Jackson Prairie storage were twice as high as scheduled nominations, Northwest said. If system drafting continues, “Northwest will be forced to evaluate customer-specific and/or general entitlements in order to stop any drastic decline in our Jackson Prairie balancing gas.”

Dan Gordon, 27, who once headed Merrill Lynch’s global energy markets group and then went on to run the unit when it was sold to Allegheny Energy last year, on Friday pleaded guilty to criminal charges of money laundering, wire fraud and conspiracy to falsify books and records.

Congress went home for the holidays last week with a massive $400 billion overhaul of Medicare under its belt, but passage of a comprehensive energy bill eluded it for the third year in a row. The bill became deadlocked in the Senate when Republican-led proponents were unable to find two additional votes to push the measure through, effectively stranding the bill in Congress until next year. GOP leaders vowed to pick up where they left off when they return for the second session in late January.

CenterPoint issued an Operational Alert after Unit #2 at Delhi Compressor Station went down for unscheduled repairs Monday morning. The outage is a force majeure condition and is expected to last until Oct. 11. It limits the ColumbiaGulf/Perryville delivery point in northwest Louisiana to 270,000 Dth/d, CenterPoint said. No interruptible deliveries will be scheduled during this time and firm delivery nominations will be reduced as necessary.

In a case that tests the limits of how far California went in establishing third-party, non-utility natural gas storage, two of the state’s energy heavyweights — Pacific Gas and Electric Co. and Calpine Corp. — are going toe-to-toe over allegations that Calpine has “colluded” with a third-party storage operator, Lodi Gas Storage. PG&E’s utility wants state regulators to come down hard on both the merchant operators.