Regulatory

As Mexico’s natural gas market continues to evolve, next year will see the beginning of transaction data reporting to the government. Eventually, trading hubs are expected to emerge, and a financial market should come into being to complement physical trading, according to the head of the regulatory unit of Mexico’s Comision Reguladora de Energia (CRE).

Staff of FERC’s Office of Enforcement (OE) sought to recover more than $567 million in civil penalties and $45 million in disgorgement through litigation work in Fiscal Year 2016. The most significant shift in the nature of the Division of Investigations (DOI) work during the year was the amount of time spent litigating in federal District Court, OE officials said Thursday.

FERC on Thursday granted Magnum Gas Storage LLC amendments to its certificate for natural gas storage facilities being developed in Utah, extending the timeline to complete the project and allowing wheeling service at market-based rates.

Lawmakers in the U.S. Senate convened Thursday to resume consideration of a bill that calls for revenue sharing among states involved in existing, new or future energy production from both onshore and offshore leasing areas.

The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) has proposed withdrawal of a requirement that certain power plants (typically coal-fired) in Texas participate in the second phase of the Cross-State Air Pollution Rule (CSAPR) trading programs for annual emissions of sulfur dioxide (SO2) and nitrogen oxides, according to a notice in the Federal Register. The move “…is intended to address a decision of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit remanding the CSAPR Phase 2 SO2 budget for Texas to the EPA for reconsideration,” the notice said.

A subsidiary of Dominion Resources Inc. on Tuesday filed an application with FERC for its Eastern Market Access Project. The $147.3 million project calls for construction facilities and upgrades to existing infrastructure in Maryland and Virginia in order to provide 294,000 Dth/d of firm transport capacity to two electric utilities.

The Department of Interior on Wednesday reached a milestone settlement with Devon Energy Corp. to cancel 15 oil and natural gas leases in northwest Montana, an area considered sacred by the Blackfeet Tribe.

Pennsylvania Gov. Tom Wolf visited Pittsburgh on Tuesday to hail a partnership between the Environmental Defense Fund (EDF), Google, Peoples Natural Gas and Carnegie Mellon University that is identifying and mapping methane leaks from the city’s distribution pipelines.

To provide added assurance of grid reliability in the face of ever-greater use of renewable resources, Portland General Electric (PGE) on Tuesday proposed an updated integrated resource plan (IRP) for Oregon, with more than half of added power supplies coming from natural gas-fired or other forms of dispatchable generation.