Regulatory

The Republican-controlled House of Representatives proposed budget, released Tuesday, takes a hatchet to what the party views as excessive or unnecessary spending, but the plan has kind words for domestic energy, namely oil and natural gas.

Pacific Gas and Electric Co. (PG&E) shareholders would be on the hook for $850 million worth of safety upgrades to the utility’s natural gas system under a new settlement proposal from California Public Utility Commission (CPUC) President Michael Picker. It addresses gas system mismanagement discovered after a 2010 pipeline rupture and explosion in San Bruno.

Preliminary work on Transcontinental Gas Pipe Line Co. LLC’s (Transco) proposed Leidy Southeast expansion, which would relieve capacity constraints in the Marcellus Shale while serving local distribution companies along the Atlantic Seaboard, appear to be on hold pending the outcome of a lawsuit filed by the Delaware Riverkeeper Network (DRN).

U.S. energy policies should heed the country’s new era of natural gas and oil abundance with an overhaul to make them less burdensome and more transparent, ExxonMobil Corp.’s chief said Thursday in Washington, DC.

Calls for change at the California Public Utilities Commission (CPUC) grew louder at a state Senate hearing Wednesday during which outside experts called for reforms and a consumer attorney exposed alleged ex parte communications violations dating back more than a decade.

The U.S. government may not pursue charges against two former BP plc supervisors under a 177-year-old federal statute covering seaman’s manslaughter for their roles in the Macondo well blowout in 2010, which resulted in the deaths of 11 men, a federal appeals court ruled Wednesday. However, they still face 11 counts of involuntary manslaughter.

Environmentalists and community activists have asked the California Energy Commission (CEC) to stop the permitting process that has dragged on for years for an on-again, off-again research/demonstration project that would usher in commercial carbon-capture-and-storage (CCS).

Critics increasingly are sounding the alarm over California’s underground injection control (UIC) program, but state and industry officials said the problem is overstated because no drinking water supplies in the state have been contaminated.

Protesters may find it more difficult to disrupt future FERC meetings after the regulators this week adopted a rule, based on language already in use by other federal agencies, specifying “the roles available to the public at the Commission’s open meetings.”