Daily GPI

Citing current uncertainty in the electric power market, Aquila Inc. and Cogentrix Energy Inc. on Friday jointly agreed to drop the planned acquisition of Cogentrix by Aquila. The companies said that currently “the transaction impractical and not in either company’s best interest.” The transaction between Aquila and the Charlotte, NC-based company was announced in April (see Power Market Today, May 1). Aquila said it did not consider the termination part of its “ongoing efforts” to sell $1 billion in non-strategic assets.

Williams added another $80 million in cash on Friday to the $3.4 billion in transactions announced earlier last week to resolve its current liquidity crisis and strengthen its finances. The company said it closed the sale of its Kansas Hugoton natural gas gathering system to FrontStreet Hugoton LLC, an affiliate of FrontStreet Partners LLC and GE Structured Finance Group, for $100 million. Williams will net $80 million after purchase price adjustments to reflect current capital obligations assumed by FrontStreet and net revenues from prior periods.

The drive by the Connecticut Attorney General to keep the new 24-mile, 330 MW underwater cable system linking Connecticut to Long Island from going into operation on Monday could jeopardize power reliability on Long Island during the hottest part of the summer.

San Diego-based Sempra Energy’s international unit was busy Thursday pushing and pulling in Latin America, trying to make things happen in its aggressive game plan south of the border.

Kerr-McGee Corp. lost 50 cents more per share in the second quarter than it originally reported, announcing Friday that “subsequent events” since the quarter ended June 30 will require it to include environmental remediation costs at former plant sites and additional exploration expenses.

A veteran analyst of natural gas fundamentals sees a very tight balance between supply and demand with prices rising to well over $4.00 by February.

Consumer advocates are expected to be out in force for a series of public hearings scheduled by the California Public Utilities Commission (CPUC) on a substantial rate increase request by Las-Vegas, NV-based Southwest Gas Corp.

Transco completed construction work at Station 35 and station capacity was nearly back to normal as of Friday afternoon, a spokeswoman said. The project, which was causing an allocation bottleneck at downstream Station 40, began in May and was originally scheduled to end July 1 but got delayed (see Daily GPI, July 23). There will be additional commissioning outages in coming weeks that will restrict Station 40 capacity temporarily, but most will be only one day long, the spokeswoman said.

Except for only slightly lower numbers on most Rockies pipes and gains at related Sumas and Westcoast Station 2, all points recorded double-digit (triple-digit in the case of Transco Zone 6-NYC) losses Friday. There was still plenty of hot weather to go around, especially in the South, Mid-Atlantic and desert Southwest, but enough moderation had occurred from the severe levels earlier in the week that prices succumbed to the drag of a bearish storage report/screen the day before and the usual demand slump over a weekend.