Regulatory

The Department of the Interior’s Bureau of Land Management (BLM) announced Friday that it will suspend coal leasing on federal lands pending a “comprehensive review” of the program.

Reflecting a more sanguine view of his state’s oil/natural gas sector than in recent years, Colorado Gov. John Hickenlooper stressed renewables, sustainability and the environment in the brief energy portion of his state-of-the-state address in Denver Thursday.

Responding to Gov. Jerry Brown’s mandate amid heightened safety concerns about the nearly three-month-old Aliso Canyon well leak, California regulators on Friday served notice of issuing emergency natural gas storage regulations.

FERC should weigh Transcontinental Gas Pipeline Co. LLC’s (Transco) Virginia Southside Expansion Project II and its Atlantic Sunrise Project simultaneously as they both involve work at the same existing compressor station in Virginia, environmentalists told the Commission in a motion to intervene out of time.

Dynegy Inc. on Tuesday again lashed out at American Electric Power Co. and FirstEnergy Corp.’s proposed power purchase agreements with Ohio regulators, offering an alternative and saying it could save the state’s consumers billions of dollars by providing power at lower costs and building more natural gas-fired power plants.

Federal prosecutors in the U.S. Attorney’s Office for the Northern District of California have submitted testimony in its criminal case against Pacific Gas and Electric Co. (PG&E), alleging that shoddy recordkeeping contributed to a 2010 natural gas pipeline rupture and explosion that killed eight people in San Bruno, a suburb south of San Francisco.

Lawmakers in the U.S. House of Representatives, along mostly partisan lines, joined their Senate colleagues on Wednesday in passing a resolution disapproving of the Obama administration’s plan to rewrite the controversial Clean Water Rule (CWR).

Vermont regulators have agreed to allow Vermont Gas Systems Inc. to complete construction of a 41-mile natural gas pipeline extension in the western part of the state, after the utility agreed to cap the amount it would recover from ratepayers for the project. The cost of the project has increased more than 78% since it was approved two years ago.

European regulators have launched the second phase of an antitrust investigation concerning the mega-merger of Halliburton Ltd. and Baker Hughes Inc.