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California energy officials held their breath Monday and bracedthemselves for what might be the severest test yet for the state’soverworked electricity infrastructure and overheated wholesalepower market.

Nine energy traders have teamed up to form the Energy TradingStandards Group, an open consortium that plans to work towarddeveloping standards to automate the sale of wholesale energy andto improve information sharing among traders.

BP further cemented its position as the top natural gas producerin North America last week when it acquired the outstandingminority interest in Houston-based independent producer VastarResources Inc.

The first of the marketers to bow out of the natural gasderegulation era in Georgia is going on the offensive almost a yearafter the company filed for bankruptcy. Peachtree Natural Gas whichis still in bankruptcy court, filed a $50 million suit against AGLResources, Atlanta Gas Light and billing provider Utilipro in theState Court of Fulton County.

Natural gas bills for residential households this winter couldbe as much as 40% higher than last heating season, with the Midwestlikely to feel the pinch the most, according to a market overviewpresented by the Energy Information Administration (EIA) last week.

In the midst of this week’s power alerts exacerbated byCalifornia’s shortage of electric generating capacity, theSacramento Municipal Utility District drew only three responses toa proposal put out for bids early in the summer to have a developerbuild, own and operate a natural gas-fired 500 to 1,000 MWgeneration plant on part of a 2,000-acre site owned by the nation’slargest municipal utility. The earliest the plant would beoperational would be in 2004.

Burlington Resources expects to top First Call/ThomsonFinancial’s earnings estimate for the company’s third quarter by$.06 to $.11 cents, but reports production may lag in comparison tolast quarter due to the “natural decline” in some of its operationareas.

Although a lot of leg work still remains to be done, PetroleosMexicanos, the national oil company of Mexico, plans to drill fivedeepwater wells in the deepwater Gulf of Mexico in the next sevento 10 years, according to a petroleum engineer for PemexExploration & Production.

State-by-state regulation is holding back the development of amore competitive U.S. energy economy while other countries alreadyare benefiting from deregulation — something that regulators needto realize, the CEO of UtiliCorp United told energy executivesyesterday.