As several parent companies of the top natural gas pipelines face severe credit and liquidity problems, this could put a major crimp in future plans to bolster the nation’s energy infrastructure, both for gas and electricity, FERC Chairman Pat Wood told Congress Wednesday during a hearing examining energy infrastructure issues.

Testifying before the Senate Energy and Natural Resources Committee, Wood said he asked his staff at FERC on Wednesday to list for him “the top companies on the natural gas side…for pipelines.” The first was El Paso Natural Gas, which was followed in descending order by Williams, Duke Energy, NiSource, Kinder Morgan and Enron, he noted.

“Not all the companies on that list are what you would call in trouble, but more than half of them are,” he said. “And so if we’re to depend on that list to be the golden arrow… to make sure we have sufficient natural gas, the recent creditworthiness issues that have been raised about a number of these companies really do bring us to a critical point on the future of infrastructure investments in this country.”

While the need to stay ahead of that curve on construction has generally been met over the past decade, Wood said that he fears that with “certainly the type of headlines like we saw in today’s [Wall Street] Journal, ‘Amid Collapsing Power Market, Energy Companies are Reeling,’ there’s a significant overlap on the natural gas side.”

A lack of new gas pipeline construction would significantly affect the electricity market as well. “An increasing amount of power is being generated by natural gas,” Wood said. “It has a lot of environmental attributes, it is a domestic fuel, there are a lot of positive things about natural gas, but one of the most important things about it is that it really only exists in certain parts of the continent and needs to get to the markets, which are generally [a] distance from where the production zones are.”

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