NGI The Weekly Gas Market Report

Canada’s National Energy Board plans to hold public meetings this week on a pipeline to connect the mainland with Vancouver Island through the Georgia Strait.

While FERC’s ability to monitor the electric power market has faltered, a report by a Commission task force has found that the level of price spikes for wholesale power has grown progressively higher over the past couple of summers, with the biggest increases being seen in the eastern half of the nation.

Conservative exploration and development strategies andacquisitions, coupled with a growing demand for energy, enabled theworld’s largest oil and gas companies to reduce reserve replacementcosts 14% from a year ago, and dramatically increase net profits -by as much as 900%, according to an analysis by energy researchfirm John S. Herold Inc.

In a deal that is being called the biggest in the Canadianenergy industry this year, two Calgary companies, Husky Oil Ltd.and Renaissance Energy Ltd., agreed last week to merge into HuskyEnergy, a move that will catapult the new company into the top tierof Canada’s publicly traded energy firms.

Shell Energy Services Co. LLC, the third largest natural gas marketer in Georgia, hopes to extend its success in the residential arena to the large commercial and industrial market in the state with several new product offerings and a new website, www.shellenergyconnect.com.

Unable to end a stalemate over two key issues, Republican and Democrat leaders of the Senate Energy and Natural Resources Committee sent up a white flag last week, conceding defeat in their struggle to pass comprehensive electric restructuring legislation this year.

Rochester Gas and Electric (RG&E), has reached an agreementwith the New York Public Service Commission (PSC) staff and othercompanies and groups to actively promote the customers’ right tochoose among competing natural gas suppliers.

Market-power abuse in the electric industry often goes “unnoticed” by FERC because enforcement of the rules under Order 888, which are “frequently opaque,” is mostly left up to the transmission owners themselves, according to consulting firm Tabors Caramanis & Associates in Cambridge, MA.

It’s been less than a month since FERC scolded the New York Independent System Operator (NYISO) for blunders that resulted in the rejection of commercially viable power imports, but the ISO is under the gun again, this time for computer-related snafus that rejected commercially viable power exports to the Pennsylvania, New Jersey and Maryland ISO (see NGI, June 5 and May 8).