Work

Begin early and work overtime to keep what you got — that was the advice of an Offshore Technology Conference panel this week on how to recruit for the oil and gas field. Demand is especially high for experience from top to bottom, which has led to a high turnover as companies aggressively go after other company employees.

Transwestern reported beginning unplanned maintenance Wednesday on the #2 unit at its Atoka Compressor Station in southeast New Mexico. The work, expected to last through Sunday, is reducing Atoka Lateral capacity from 160,000 MMBtu/d to 131,000 MMBtu/d.

California legislators and regulators returned to work after the Easter holiday with a full plate of actions pending in the state’s electricity crisis, including the implementation of last week’s agreement between the governor and Southern California Edison Co. Meanwhile, the negative fallout from the utilities’ credit-worthiness problems continues to add pressure for faster state action.

California’s ever-changing electricity saga ended the firstquarter of 2001 as it started the year – a work in progress. Itsscope widened again last week with regulators, legislators and thecourts working overtime to keep up. Supplies remained tight withthree Stage Two power alerts called during the week.

El Paso said Wednesday a maintenance outage of Line 3110 inHoward County, TX is now scheduled for March 10-14. The pipelinepreviously had said the work would occur March 5-11 (see Daily GPI,Feb. 27). The IVEALMOR interconnect will not be able to deliver anygas into El Paso during the outage.

A cross-section of U.S. energy representatives last weekpresented a laundry list of initiatives that they believe the WhiteHouse, Congress and regulators must actively pursue to build up thenation’s energy inventories, which they warn are at dangerously lowlevels.

Speaking prior to the launch of numerous state legislative proposals last week designed to solve California’s power crisis, FERC Chairman Curt Hebert expressed disappointment with the speed and direction the state has taken so far in attempting to manage its predicament.

Regional Reliability Councils and their members are about 90%compliant, but work still needs to be done to bring standards upand encourage non-members to join, according to the latest reportfrom the North American Electricity Reliability Council. NERC haspublished its findings for the second of four phases of its Year2000 Compliance Program, created to ensure adherence to NERC andregional standards.

FERC Chairman James J. Hoecker last week proposed that state andfederal regulators work together to ensure that regionaltransmission organizations (RTOs) result in healthy regionalelectricity markets.