Wish

Building natural gas reserves in the Fayetteville Shale appears to be high on the wish lists for two Houston-based producers. Leading leaseholder Southwestern Energy Co. said it will spend $1 billion in the coming year to expand its growing gas production in the Arkansas play, and up-and-comer Petrohawk Energy Corp. has added to its stake in the region.

Building natural gas reserves in the Fayetteville Shale appears to be high on the wish lists for two Houston-based producers. Leading leaseholder Southwestern Energy Co. said it will spend $1 billion in the coming year to expand its growing gas production in the Arkansas play, and up-and-comer Petrohawk Energy Corp. has added to its stake in the region.

While some energy industry members likely wish that so much gas-fired power generation capacity had not been built — industrial gas consumers, for instance — the fact is that it’s here to stay, and the gas-power convergence is still very much with us.

After pushing for an overhaul of the nation’s energy policy since 2001, President Bush could get his wish this year as the U.S. Congress may actually make good on his request to have an agreed-upon energy bill on his desk by Aug. 1 — or not.

If you haven’t sent in one last wish list to the congressional energy bill conferees, you should be aware time is running out. E-mail advisories were flying Thursday when it became apparent the energy bill steamroller was powered up and targeted for completion by next week and the last word on natural gas provisions could well be this weekend or Monday.

Just in time for the holidays, Cheniere Energy Inc. filed with the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission (FERC) applications for permits to construct liquefied natural gas (LNG) receiving terminals in Sabine Pass, LA and Corpus Christi, TX along with two related natural gas pipelines

BP, Conoco, Oneok, Reliant and Sempra topped Mastio & Co. 2002 gas marketer customer satisfaction ranking. The companies that showed the greatest improvement from 2001, Mastio said, were BP, Duke Energy, ExxonMobil and Sempra. However, of the 20 marketers in the 2001 customer satisfaction index, only 13 remained in 2002 and several of those have announced they are exiting the marketing business, Mastio noted in its statement on the ranking.

If Houston-based Enron Corp., the acknowledged largest energy trader in the world, had a wish list of things it might want to add to its bartering bag, it might be to trade in this entire year. So far, the news seems to have gone from bad to worse, with business deals gone sour, the CEO abruptly departing last summer, the first quarterly loss in more than four years, rumors of shady business deals, and as of Friday, a plunging stock price that seems to find no floor.

If Houston-based Enron Corp., the acknowledged largest energy trader in the world, had a wish list of things it might want to add to its bartering bag, it might be to trade in this entire year. So far, the news seems to have gone from bad to worse, with business deals gone sour, the CEO abruptly departing last summer, the first quarterly loss in more than four years, rumors of shady business deals, and as of Friday, a plunging stock price that seems to find no floor.