Advising Encino Acquisition Partners (Encino Energy) on agreements for the sale and transportation of Encino's natural gas for compliance with Federal Energy Regulatory Commission requirements. Encino acquired the Ohio Utica Shale assets of Chesapeake Energy.

We advised a large independent oil and gas exploration and production company that will be an anchor shipper on a new regulated crude oil gathering pipeline in the Delaware Basin of Texas and New Mexico that will move crude oil from the basin to larger trunk pipelines and on to Cushing, Oklahoma and other points.  We assisted in the negotiation of a letter of intent, a transportation service agreement including benefits for anchor shippers that will require approval by the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission’s (“FERC”) in a petition for declaratory order, tariff provisions, storage agreements, and other contracts.  We also advised the client on timing and options for dealing with FERC’s current lack of a quorum, which limits the agency’s ability to issue the requisite declaratory order.  In addition, we reviewed and assisted in the negotiation of downstream transportation agreements.

We represented an energy provider in a commercial agreement to sell compressed natural gas (CNG) to commercial customers and a related $6 million convertible preferred equity investment in the CNG supplier.

Working with our colleagues Mercados-AF we submitted two new laws to the Jamaican government. The consortium, Mercados-AF, was awarded two World Bank contracts to develop and implement new electricity and gas sector policies. We partnered with them to write two new energy acts. We wrote a framework for a new Electricity Act that will foster competition for new power plants on the island. We also developed the framework for a new Natural Gas Act that will govern the import, storage, sale, transmission, and distribution of natural gas – whether in the form of LNG, compressed natural gas, or locally discovered gas. The Ministry of Science, Technology, Energy and Mining of Jamaica is very pleased with the results of both projects.

We successfully obtained from the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission (FERC) two key waivers of its capacity release rules for a large independent oil and gas producer client.  FERC requires that shippers on natural gas pipelines that seek to transfer pipeline capacity in connection with a large transaction or exiting the natural gas supply business seek a waiver of the capacity release rules and policies to ensure that there are no inadvertent violations. 

We represented the Independent Oil & Gas Association of West Virginia, Inc. in a successful resolution of a contentious multi-party settlement of Texas Eastern Transmission's revised natural gas quality specifications. This settlement secured the flexibility and standards needed for Marcellus Shale gas and traditional Appalachian supplies to meet pipeline specifications.

As development of the Marcellus shale natural gas formation accelerated in 2010, Texas Eastern Transmission, a major interstate pipeline, and its large utility customers began to develop new quality specifications for natural gas shipped on the pipeline. Although Appalachian natural gas has long included high concentrations of ethane, and that gas previously met pipeline quality specifications and posed no threat to pipelines or consumer equipment, the large utilities wanted the ethane removed from the gas stream – at the producer's cost. The principal market for ethane is the petrochemical manufacturing region in Texas and Louisiana and there is no existing pipeline or other reasonable means of shipping the ethane. Representing long-time gas producer association clients Independent Oil & Gas Association of West Virginia, Inc. and Independent Oil & Gas Association of Pennsylvania, Pierce Atwood led the efforts to forge a multiparty settlement of the quality specifications at FERC. Pierce Atwood's efforts avoided costly litigation and secured the producers and pipelines upstream of Texas Eastern significant flexibility and gas quality standards that ensure Marcellus shale gas and traditional Appalachian supplies will meet pipeline specifications and flow to critical northeastern market.

We represented Xpress Natural Gas (XNG) in expanding access to compressed natural gas throughout the State of Maine and elsewhere in New England. Pierce Atwood assisted XNG in obtaining all necessary regulatory approvals and environmental permits for compressed natural gas production facilities in Baileyville and Eliot, Maine. These facilities receive natural gas from major pipelines, condition and compress it, and then dispense it into tank trailers made of composite materials. The trailers are then trucked to customer locations throughout Maine and elsehwhere, where the CNG is used primarily as boiler fuel. These were the first facilities of their kind in New England, and allow consumers who are not presently served by a gas utility to take advantage of this abundant, clean burning, economic and domestically produced energy resource. Our attorneys successfully led XNG through the process of obtaining approvals from the Public Utilities Commission. We drafted and obtained a town zoning ordinance amendment and other local approvals, and successfully navigated permit or exemption issues before the Department of Environmental Protection, the Maine Fuel Board, and the State Fire Marshal. We were also successful in determining that the facility was not subject to Federal Energy Regulatory Commission jurisdiction.