NGI Archives

In a two-page mea culpa to shippers, Enron Transportation &Storage (ETS) owned up to seven sins revealed by a recent customersurvey and offered six solutions with the promise of more to come.

Denver-based KN Energy (KNE) made a big entrance into thegas-fired power generation business yesterday by purchasing 10% ofthe generation in the state of Colorado and becoming the largestindependent power producer in the state. It purchased Denver-basedThermo Co., an electrical engineering firm that specializes indistributed power. The deal is designed to prepare KNE for eventualelectric industry deregulation and competition in its home state.

TECO Energy gas utility Peoples Gas System, Florida’s largestretail gas distributor, announced plans to expand distributionservice to southwest Florida. Customers in the Lee County area,including Fort Myers and Cape Coral as well as Naples andsurrounding communities, will be able to buy natural gas for thefirst time.

Columbia Gas of Pennsylvania’s supplier-choice program savedparticipating customers in Washington and Allegheny counties about$1.8 million during the 1997-98 winter heating season, the companysaid. Paula Frauen, manager of energy services, said the 37,000residential and small commercial customers enrolled in the programeach saved about $9 a month, 8.6% less than what they would havepaid had they bought gas from Columbia Gas of Pennsylvania.

Viking Gas Transmission formally dropped out of the VikingVoyageur partnership earlier this week and now plans to test themarket for a separate, smaller expansion of its existing system,VGT President Greg Palmer, a former spokesman for Voyageur, saidyesterday. VGT intends to hold an open season to collect customerinterest in the project this summer.

UtiliCorp United and Andersen Consulting are engaged in a legalbattle over fees for work Andersen did for UtiliCorp that theclient says spiraled to more than twice the amount agreed upon.Most recently, UtiliCorp filed a $10 million suit in a Missouricourt charging Andersen with negligence and failure to live up toterms of a 1996 contract for administrative software and systems.The suit is a response to a complaint filed in March by Andersenseeking payment of fees UtiliCorp had withheld.

Chevron U.S.A. Production Co. announced the discovery of a largenew natural gas trend offshore Mississippi in the Gulf of Mexicothat could hold 1 Tcf of gross reserves. Chevron said the VioscaKnoll Carbonate Trend is unique to the Gulf in part because of itssize and because it’s the first offshore gas reserves to originatefrom Lower Cretaceous reservoirs. The Lower Cretaceous, however,has been productive onshore in Texas, Louisiana and in Mexico.

Standardization of short-term transportation services andmarket-based pricing for those services are front-burner issues atthe Federal Energy Regulatory Commission, new Commissioner Linda K.Breathitt told Washington attorneys Thursday.

It hardly came as a surprise to anyone when cash prices took along, hard fall Thursday. The previous day’s screen dive had givena none-too-subtle signal of where cash was going. Double-digitdecreases were prevalent at virtually all points, with some lossesreaching 20 cents.