A shuffle of the top jobs in Fortis Bank’s Houston energy trading operations is in the works, with energy marketing and trading president Jim Fallon stepping down. Sorry, no photo of Fortis’ local guys. Fallon and David Jones, head of global oil for Fortis, were co-heads of the Houston office, which included the former trading [...]  More »

University of Texas researchers we wrote about previously will get a $38 million grant to inject large quantities of carbon dioxide underground to test the longterm viability of carbon sequestration. UT’s Sue Hovorka (and colleague Tip Meckal who isn’t pictured here) get the backing to bury some CO2 for a looooong time. The Bureau of [...]  More »

As we report in this morning’s paper, BP has two big settlements with government regulators pending, a $50 million settlement of criminal allegations related to the deadly March 2005 Texas City refinery explosion and a $300 million settlement of propane market manipulation charges from 2004. Now it looks like a settlment of a criminal investigation [...]  More »

So the price of oil is flirting with new records, but what about the other white meat, natural gas? Turns out it’s doing its own thing. Gas for November delivery fell 12 cents, or 1.6 percent, to $7.367 per million btus on the NYMEX Tuesday, likely due to news a survey of analysts by Bloomberg [...]  More »

The Nuclear Regulatory Commission has posted the public version of NRG Energy’s application to build two new nuclear reactors at the South Texas Project near Bay City. The application is the first for a new plant in the U.S. in decades and the first to use the new combined construction and operating license process. One [...]  More »

The Environmental Protection Agency plans to develop regulations for underground sequestration of carbon dioxide, the process of injecting CO2 emissions from power plants or other sources deep into the earth for permanent storage. The rules will be aimaed at ensuring there’s a “… consistent and effective permit system under the Safe Drinking Water Act for [...]  More »

Luminant logo: I don’t see any coal plants, do you? The private equity buyout of Dallas power giant TXU Corp. became official this afternoon. This means TXU has changed its name to Energy Future Holdings Corp. (catchy!) and TXU’s stock will be delisted from the New York Stock Exchange and the Chicago Stock Exchange as [...]  More »

Sunday and today we’ve run stories about why electric deregulation in Texas hasn’t met its promise of lowering prices and what some suggest can be done about it. Here’s Sunday’s story outlining the problem (see the links to various graphics and profiles of customers) and Monday’s story about some possible ways to improve the system. [...]  More »

A Federal sale of offshore oil and natural gas leases in the Central Gulf of Mexico attracted $2,904,321,011 in high bids today, the second highest total of high bids in U.S. leasing history, according to U.S. Department of the Interior’s Minerals Management Service. The sale, the first to include the Central Gulf of Mexico, offered [...]  More »

Changes being proposed to the taxing structure around the huge oil sands projects in Alberta, Canada could cut the value of those projects by $26 billion, says investment bank Wood Mackenzie. And investment bank Tristone Capital says the Alberta govnernment’s efforts to get a bigger slice from the oil sands pie could backfire, leading producers [...]  More »