ATP Oil & Gas Corp fka ATPAQ

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GE: Sticking With That Old-Energy Religion
Posted by Keith Johnson
Just because President Obama’s budget takes aim at the oil patch doesn’t mean big companies are fleeing it altogether. Take General Electric, which Friday morning announced a total of $276 million in U.S. oil and gas investments.




Angling for old energy (AP)
That includes $150 million in partnership with Houston-based ATP Oil & Gas Corporation to operate a floating oil and gas rig in the Gulf of Mexico, GE Energy Finance’s “first finvestment in a floating oil and gas production facility.” It also includes $126 million to help Regency Energy Partners complete an expansion of a natural-gas pipeline for the Haynesville Shale in Lousiana.

GE’s Ecomagination unit gets plenty of attention for its push into “green energy,” and the conglomerate is the biggest U.S. maker of wind turbines. It’s also leading the charge into new energy technology like the smart grid. But old energy is just as important for GE, from U.S. oil and gas production to oil-fired power plants in Saudi Arabia.

GE’s rationale for the pipeline investment—at a time when U.S. natural-gas supplies are hardly constrained—underscores the company’s embrace of an all-of-the-above energy policy, whatever the policy direction of the Obama budget.

“[T]his project will improve the overall energy security and independence of the United States by alleviating a transportation bottleneck experienced by many producers in the Haynesville area,” said Dan Castagnola, managing director at GE Energy Financial Services.

http://blogs.wsj.com/environmentalcapital/2009/02/27/ge-sticking-with-that-old-energy-religion/?mod=msn_money_ticker