Posts Tagged ‘finance’

Building gas power plants: Investment or speculation?

By Peter Maloney | October 23, 2012 10:18 AM Comments (1)

Bankers’ memories are likely to be tested by the current power generation market.

While discussing the challenging outlook for financing new power plants during a recent conference in New York, Carl Williams, a principal at Riverstone Holdings, harkened back to 1998-2001 when a sudden surge in building new generation fired by natural gas resulted in the addition of 70 GW to the grid. But rather than scaling back, developers – and the bankers who funded them – continued the build-out, adding another 105 GW between 2001 and 2003, the equivalent of replacing the entire capacity of the PJM Interconnection, Williams noted.

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Renewables developers begin to look beyond tax credits

By Peter Maloney | June 29, 2012 03:54 PM Comments (0)

Some people would say that developers of renewable energy projects are optimists. A rosy outlook would certainly be helpful in an environment in which low natural gas prices are challenging the push toward the Holy Grail of renewable energy, reaching price parity with fossil fuel-fired generation.

That alone could be enough to dim the outlook of a US renewable energy developer, without the added concerns of a tighter banking climate brought about by more restrictive capital requirements and legislative gridlock over renewable incentives such as the production tax credit, which expires at the end of the year.

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Forget Solyndra: The bigger picture of Obama’s 1705 and 1603 programs is California’s RPS

By Jeff Ryser | June 26, 2012 12:38 PM Comments (0)

The name Solyndra has a certain sizzle for those who happen to reside on one of the two ends of the political spectrum.

Very generally put, anti-renewable, right-leaning Republicans utter the name with a certain salaciousness as it connotes to them “crony capitalism.” 

Left-leaning Democrats often blanch at the utterance of the name, but insist Solyndra–and its loss of $530 million in tax payer loans–was the cost of the government stimulating renewables needed to fight climate change.

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Petrodollars: no shortage of private equity investing in oil and gas

By News Desk | June 11, 2012 09:44 AM Comments (0)

The role of private equity financing upstream US oil and gas exploration has grown considerably in recent years, and it shows no signs of slowing. Starr Spencer discusses the trend in this week’s Oilgram News column, Petrodollars.

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Beal is back in the merchant power game

By Peter Maloney | May 30, 2012 08:57 AM Comments (0)

Full-page color ads ran in the Wall Street Journal almost every day last week touting Beal Bank’s prowess at “Financing Merchant Power.”

Who?

Actually the deals touted were by CSG Investments, a Dallas financial adviser to its affiliates, Beal Bank, of Texas, and Beal Bank USA, of Nevada. Not that CSG is more familiar to many in power sector financing than Beal Bank is. Historically the power sector has been dominated by big banks, big European banks with a global reach.

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John Arnold and the knock-on effects of shrinking margins

By Jeff Ryser | May 3, 2012 03:21 PM Comments (0)

This “period of persistent low prices,” as a state regulator called it recently, is playing havoc with margins in a lot of different segments of the energy industry.

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It may not have been historic, but 2011 was big for CFTC

By Brian Scheid | December 28, 2011 09:13 AM Comments (1)

It’s hard to say with a straight face that 2011 for the Commodity Futures Trading Commission was truly historic.

The idea of historians a century from now breathlessly discussing the debate over the federal commodity position limits regime or a new market manipulation standard may seem downright absurd.

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Petrobras CEO lays out a long list of things his company needs

By John Kingston | November 8, 2011 01:57 AM Comments (0)

As Tokyo prepares for Christmas, a very big holiday here, Jose Sergio Gabrielli de Azevedo showed up in Japan’s capital with what he wanted Santa to bring him. It was a lot more than 12 drummers drumming and five gold rings.

The Petrobras CEO has been making a grand tour of Asia the past two weeks, speaking and holding media briefings in Singapore (at Singapore International Energy Week), South Korea and Tokyo.

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Oil Matters: how low natural gas prices are about to hit some power plants

By Beth Evans | August 26, 2011 11:39 AM Comments (0)

In the latest installment of the joint Platts/Oil Council podcast “Oil Matters,” the focus is on shale gas.

But it’s not one more chapter in the “shale gas is creating an energy revolution” story. Rather, it’s how the low price of natural gas in the US as a result of supplies from the shale are about to start hurting some gas consumers. The financing that allowed some merchant power plant to be built sometimes included hedges that assumed a higher natural gas price. With those hedges coming off, it counter-intuitively can be bad news for the facilities’ owners, even though they are buyers of natural gas.

Iskender H. “Alex” Catto, a partner with McDermott Will & Emery LLP in New York, spoke with Platts’ John Kingston about his forecast. You can listen to it here.

Julia’s billions of barrels of oil raise more than a few eyebrows

By Margaret McQuaile | August 23, 2011 05:55 PM Comments (0)

A billion barrels here. A billion barrels there. Pretty soon you’re talking about a lot of oil. 

When it comes to ExxonMobil’s Julia discovery in the Gulf of Mexico, however, the only projection the company actually has ever provided is one vague word: “significant.”

But that didn’t stop industry analysts and journalists from freaking out recently at the language used by ExxonMobil lawyers in a lawsuit against the US government contesting rejection of an extension on the company’s lease at that prospect. More specifically, in the first paragraph of their pleadings, the legal team charged the rejection is “depriving ExxonMobil of the right to produce a reservoir believed to hold billions of barrels of oil.”

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