Europe

The government of Norway put forward 56 offshore blocks or part-blocks for offer under its 15th licensing round. Bids are due in by June 20 and the award of production licences is expected to take place in Q4 this year.
The bid round includes 16 blocks

Italian gas transmission company Snam has recently agreed a new third party access tariff for its transmission system. This replaces the 1989 agreement it signed with Unione Petrolifera, the body which negotiates on behalf of the Italian distributors.

A recent British High Court decision could significantly extend the enforceability of unimplemented EC Directives to privatised British utilities. In the case of Griffin and Others against South West Water Limited, it was held that individuals could enfo

British Gas has already put paid quite conclusively to the notion that any publicity is good publicity. At one time it seemed that criticising the privatised British gas utility could not fail – and indeed was bound to enhance the public profile of the c

Ofgas has announced measures to ensure the effective separation of BG's transportation and storage business (TransCo) from its trading arms. These are to be implemented to ensure that TransCo offers exactly the same terms to firms outside the BG group as

The chairman of the UK's Energy Saving Trust (EST), Lord Moore, has called for the law to be changed to prevent Ofgas from blocking its proposed energy-saving schemes. Speaking to the House of Commons environment select committee, he said he was "particu

It looks as though UK industry and energy minister Tim Eggar was right on the button when he said that he expected independent gas marketers to be offering price-savings of between 8-10% to BG customers.
Marketer Kinetica, the PowerGen-Conoco joint ven

Customer (or Site) charges are supposed to be allocated to cover the following costs:

l Customer accounting (meter reading, billing, enquiries etc)
l Datalogger costs (not relevant for the domestic market)
l Meter and service pipe costs
l Emergency

Gas consumption in western Europe rose last year to about 11,600 PetaJoules (PJ) – a curious unit for Europe* and which is about 300 Bcm in real money – for a rise of some 2% compared with 1993, according to Eurogas, the lobby group of the main gas utili

reprinted from Gas Matters, January 1995.
BG has in recent months faced a barrage of attacks from media, consumer groups and politicians. It would be quite wrong, however, to believe these are only attacks on BG – the real target is gas market liberali