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At its final meeting before the August break, FERC last weekcleared its agenda of several major rehearing orders — includingOrder 637-B, which was a rehearing of Order 637-A, which was arehearing of Order 637. This time around the Commission refused tobudge on the majority of the policy calls it made in 637-A thataddressed regulation of the short-term natural gas transportationmarket.

In a move analysts predict will help both companies realizetheir full value, Williams has begun the first steps to separateits energy division from its communications businesses. The boardof directors of the Tulsa, OK-based company voted July 23 to beginthe process, which is expected to take about 18 months.

Protesters won the opening skirmish, but still lost the firstbattle in a developing new war over expanding natural gas exportsbetween Canadian conservationists and energy consumers on theattacking side and the industry on the defense.

Could this be a trend or just a sign of growing pains? ReliantEnergy, the Houston-based electric utility and energy servicescompany, took the torch from Williams, which made a similarannouncement last week, and announced it will separate itsregulated and unregulated businesses into two publicly tradedcompanies.

Questar experienced a mechanical failure Thursday in Unit #7 atits Clay Basin storage facility. Barring unexpected complications,repairs should be complete by today and the unit available forservice again on Tuesday’s gas day, the pipeline said. Injectioncapacity has been reduced to 235,000 Dth/d during the outage.Allocation of injection capacity was expected to occur each day,with the impact determined by customer nominations. However, thereis no impact on withdrawal nominations, Questar said.

FERC last week reaffirmed the bulk of Order 639 in which it isattempting to bring about some consistency to the regulation ofnatural gas pipelines on the Outer Continental Shelf (OCS) byimposing similar reporting burdens on all facilities. It also madea few nips and tucks in the OCS order, especially with respect thefiling date for the reports and and the types of shippers that areexempted.

Finding superlatives to match the second-quarter earnings reports for energy companies across the United States in the past few weeks has been difficult at best. With earnings doubled, tripled, and for some even quadrupled, there was little bad news to report. High natural gas and crude prices, coupled with high demand, have guaranteed magnificent returns across the board.

The numbers, it seems, don’t tell the entire story. Even thoughoil and gas industry upstream revenues, profits and cash flow areshowing record profits for 1999 compared with the previous year’scollapse, exploration and development spending dropped and provedreserves spending rose significantly, according to ArthurAndersen’s 21st annual Global E&P Trends survey.

A basis blowout of immense proportions has occurred between Rocky Mountain region supply basins and the Southern California border this month and it appears to be expanding as we enter August, leading to widespread speculation and controversy in the industry about its causes.