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Even though the oil and gas industry is preparing for the “backside of the cycle” as natural gas prices fall, companies are in a better position today than in 1998, when financially constrained producers were forced to limit capital spending and drilling activity to service their debt, according to Raymond James Energy’s Stat of the Week. Analyst Wayne Andrews said, “this time around, producers have worked to maintain financial flexibility through the peak and appear to be in a much better position to handle the potential weakness in commodity prices.”

The embattled Canada-to-New York Millennium Pipeline project has been assailed for nearly every conceivable reason, or so it was thought. As the nation last week dealt with the shock of the deadly terrorist attacks in New York City and Washington, D.C., it took a New York state resident only one day after the double assaults to protest the proposed Millennium line on the grounds that it posed a prime target for terrorists.

A blue-ribbon team of veteran Canadian experts on natural gas supplies has set out to correct a starry-eyed vision of frontier resources that it says has periodically distorted North American energy policies and needs to be cleared up.

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The California senate rules committee Friday dropped contempt action against Enron Corp. after reaching agreement with the company on confidentiality protections for commercial documents the lawmakers are demanding. The agreement is identical to one signed with Reliant Energy earlier in the month, according to an Enron spokesperson.

While the series of deadly terrorist attacks on the United States last Tuesday will “change the entire agenda of Congress and the federal government” during the fall session, a key legislative analyst doubts that energy legislation will be placed on the back burner as a result.

An eleventh-and-a-half-hour attempt to enact state legislation to rescue Southern California Edison Co. from the jaws of bankruptcy seemed headed for failure at mid-afternoon Friday when the California lawmakers were attempting their rush toward adjournment for the year by midnight.

Grid operators along much of the East Coast last week went into a heightened state of alert after terrorist attacks on New York City’s World Trade Center (WTC), the Pentagon and other sites. Several grid operators indicated that they would take their cue from government authorities as to when they will ease their heightened state of alert.

El Paso Corp.’s Southern LNG Inc. has announced an open season to expand its soon-to-reopen Elba Island liquefied natural gas receiving terminal near Savannah, GA by approximately 80%. Southern LNG wants to offer an additional 3.3 Bcf of storage capacity with a send-out rate of 360 MMcf/d, with a planned in-service date of 2005. The Elba Island facility, which has been inactive since 1982, is scheduled to begin receiving shipments this month, and its expansion plans follow on the heels of two other domestic LNG expansions already in the works.