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(Bloomberg) -- The operator of the power grid in Texas was hit with a second lawsuit in as many days over power outages that left millions of residents without heat and some without water in the midst of this week’s bitter cold wave.Ercot, the Electric Reliability Council of Texas, failed to properly weatherize the state’s electric infrastructure despite a history of cold-weather power outages, according to Fears Nachawati, a Dallas-based law firm which said it filed the lawsuit on behalf of resident Donald McCarley.“Texas had practically identical failures in 1989 and 2011 that resulted in exhaustive reports and recommendations,” McCarley’s lawyer Patrick Luff said in a statement. “This was an emergency solely because of a failure to plan and learn previous lessons.”A copy of the lawsuit in Nueces County wasn’t immediately available Friday on the court docket.Also named in the suit is the American Electric Power Company, a multistate electric utility that serves parts of Texas.On Thursday, a Houston-area couple got the ball rolling in what is likely to be an avalanche of lawsuits when it sued Ercot and CenterPoint Energy Inc. in Harris County.The case is Donald McCarley v. Electric Reliability Council of Texas et al., case no. 2021CCV-60188-1, filed in the Nueces County Court at Law.Read More: As Texas Power Comes Back, New Websites Pop Up Seeking VictimsFor more articles like this, please visit us at bloomberg.comSubscribe now to stay ahead with the most trusted business news source.©2021 Bloomberg L.P.

(Bloomberg) -- Google fired the lead of its Ethical Artificial Intelligence team, Meg Mitchell, escalating the turmoil surrounding its AI division after the acrimonious exit of Mitchell’s former colleague Timnit Gebru.“I’m fired,” Mitchell tweeted Friday, a minute after saying she was “in too much pain to articulate much of anything useful. Firing @timnitGebru created a domino effect of trauma for me and the rest of the team, and I believe we are being increasingly punished for that trauma.”Mitchell’s firing highlighted that even as Google tried to move past the disarray in its AI division with an apology, a leadership change and new policies, the upheaval showed no sign of letting up.Mitchell had become a fierce public critic of Google and its management after Gebru’s exit. Gebru, one of the few prominent Black women in AI research, said she was fired in December after refusing to retract a research paper critical of a key Google technology or remove the Google authors from it. The company has said that she resigned. Mitchell was a co-author of the paper. Former colleagues expressed outrage over Google’s handling of the matter.The Alphabet Inc. company had accused Mitchell of downloading files from its systems and said it would review her conduct. For five weeks, Mitchell, who had co-led the Ethical AI team with Gebru, was locked out of all corporate systems -- unable to access her email or calendar.“After conducting a review of this manager’s conduct, we confirmed that there were multiple violations of our code of conduct, as well as of our security policies, which included the exfiltration of confidential business-sensitive documents and private data of other employees,” a Google spokesman said in a statement.Mitchell’s dismissal came the same day that Google’s head of AI, Jeff Dean, apologized to staff for how he handled Gebru’s departure and pledged that executives would be graded on diversity progress. Dean also said Google would double its human resources staff dedicated to employee retention.​Alex Hanna, a researcher on Google’s Ethical AI team, wrote that there’s a double standard for conduct at the internet giant, alluding to allegations of sexual misconduct against former executives.“Google is a breeding ground to abusers, opportunity hoarders, and people only concerned with ego and prestige,” Hanna wrote on Twitter. “But anyone who is willing to defend friends against discrimination, who lift up voices who need to be heard, are shown the door.”Earlier Friday, Dean in an email to staff said Google’s behavior toward Gebru hurt some female and Black employees and led them to question whether they belonged at the company, but he didn’t apologize directly to Gebru. The company announced a new organization for the responsible use of AI on Thursday, led by Marian Croak, a respected Black executive who had previously handled site reliability. But some members of the Ethical AI team, who will report to Croak, felt blindsided by the news.Mitchell joined Google in November 2016 after a stint at Microsoft Corp.’s research lab where she worked on the company’s Seeing AI project, a technology to help blind users “visualize” the world around them that was heavily promoted by Chief Executive Officer Satya Nadella. At Google, she founded the Ethical AI team in 2017 and worked on projects including a way to explain what machine-learning models do and their limitations, and how to make machine-learning datasets more accountable and transparent.(Updates with background on Mitchell in the last paragraph.)For more articles like this, please visit us at bloomberg.comSubscribe now to stay ahead with the most trusted business news source.©2021 Bloomberg L.P.

(Bloomberg) -- Sixth Street Partners sued to block Dyal Capital Partners’ merger with Owl Rock Capital Partners, arguing the deal would trample on its earlier pact with Dyal.Sixth Street asked a judge to put the combination on hold until she can determine whether a 2017 agreement gives the New York-based investment firm the power to kill the deal. In court filings, Dyal said Sixth Street is misinterpreting the pact and seeking to create leverage “for its own financial gain.”Under the 2017 deal, Dyal bought a stake of about 10% in Sixth Street. Then, in December, Dyal and Owl Rock announced they would join forces in a complex merger. It would allow them to go public with $45 billion in assets and a new name, Blue Owl, through a special purpose acquisition company, better known as a SPAC.“The proposed merger would fundamentally compromise the bargain Sixth Street struck in partnering with Dyal,” Sixth Street’s lawyers said in a 33-page complaint.Sixth Street disclosed in a Feb. 12 court filing that it had sued in Delaware state court to have Judge Morgan Zurn interpret the 2017 Dyal agreement to “enforce plaintiffs’ consent rights.” A redacted version of the lawsuit was made public Friday.Sixth Street’s claims are “baseless,” David Wells, a spokesman representing Dyal and Owl Rock, said earlier this week. “Sixth Street is attempting to assert the existence of a consent right that we believe simply does not exist.”Read More: Owl Rock-Dyal Blockbuster Merger Stirs Sixth Street BacklashDyal takes stakes in firms, some of which compete for the same business as Owl Rock, which has fast grown into a dominant player in the direct-lending market. Sixth Street officials said in a letter this month that they couldn’t abide having Dyal become a competitor through the Owl Rock deal.Sixth Street sued in Delaware because the state’s law covers the Dyal investment agreement, the fund said. Delaware is the corporate home to more than half of U.S. public companies and more than 60% of Fortune 500 firms. Zurn and other chancery judges hear cases without juries and can’t award punitive damages.The court is heralded for quickly deciding byzantine merger-and-acquisition disputes. Last year, a Delaware judge blessed a move by Mirae Asset Global Investments to pull out of a $5.8 billion acquisition of 15 U.S. luxury hotels owned by China-based Dajia Insurance Group because of problems tied to the coronavirus pandemic.Sixth Street wants Zurn to fast track its request to temporarily block the deal to avoid being put in the position “of being partially owned by a direct competitor, which will enjoy control and information rights putting Sixth Street at a material and enduring competitive disadvantage,” the fund said in a court filing.Dyal’s lawyers want Zurn to force Sixth Street to file an unredacted version of the agreement covering Dyal’s 2017 stake purchase to buttress their argument that Sixth Street is intentionally misreading its consent rights to pressure Dyal to sell back the holdings in the fund.“The desire to avoid clarity is precisely why Sixth Street does not want the Investment Agreement to be made public,” Dyal’s attorneys said in a Friday court filing.Sixth Street has “orchestrated a one-sided and misleading media campaign designed to poison the well with Dyal’s investors and the public at large” as part of an effort to “strong arm Dyal into selling its stake in Sixth Street at a price that is grossly unfair,” they said.Dyal is attempting to coerce Sixth Street into publishing its confidential information in full when only a few short paragraphs are relevant to the dispute, Patrick Clifford, a Sixth Street spokesman, said in an emailed statement.The case is Sixth Street Partners Management Co. v. Dyal Capital Partners, No. 2021-0127, Delaware Chancery Court (Wilmington).(Updates with Sixth Street comment in final paragraph.)For more articles like this, please visit us at bloomberg.comSubscribe now to stay ahead with the most trusted business news source.©2021 Bloomberg L.P.

(Bloomberg) -- The sprawling blackouts that plunged Texas into chaos in the midst of an historic cold blast are easing, but the energy crisis that the outages sparked continues.Four of the largest refineries in Texas are discovering widespread damage from the deep freeze that crippled the state and expect to be down for weeks of repairs, raising the potential for prolonged fuel shortages that could spread across the country.About 210,000 homes and businesses in the state were still without electricity Thursday night, according to Poweroutage.us, which aggregates data from utility websites. That’s down from more than 3 million on Wednesday. Texas Governor Greg Abbott said in a tweet that any remaining residential outage is due to downed power lines or the need for reconnection.The economic fallout from the crisis is broad and potentially lasting. U.S. oil production plunged by a record 40%. While some wells are being restarted in Texas, several companies in the oil industry have claimed force majeure, a warning to customers that they won’t be able to meet deliveries under contract.Repercussions are being felt in the global crude market. Top U.S. liquefied natural gas exporter Cheniere Energy Inc. said it’s temporarily cutting gas and electricity consumption.“None of the massive infrastructure was designed to handle freezing conditions,” Paul Sankey, an oil analyst at Sankey Research, wrote in a note. “This is an energy crisis that very few in the market, certainly outside Texas and Oklahoma, realize.”Texas Governor Greg Abbott, who has taken the extraordinary step of restricting the flow of natural gas across state lines, Thursday afternoon demanded that lawmakers make winterization of power plants mandatory. Abbott harshly criticized the state’s grid manager for what he said was a failure to provide a realistic assessment of Texas’s generating capacity prior to the unprecedented cold snap.Read More: How Extreme Cold Turned Into a U.S. Energy Crisis: QuickTakeAll time stamps are EST.Goldman Sees Big Freeze Having Small and Transitory Impact on Oil (3 a.m.)Oil output curtailed by frigid temperatures in Texas is being mostly offset by demand loss, leading to only a small and transitory impact to prices, Goldman Sachs analysts said in a Thursday research note.Oil wells shut in during the freeze will likely restart quickly when weather warms up this weekend, resulting in a net loss of about 700,000 barrels a day for the month of February, analysts including Callum Bruce said. While there was some demand increase for home heating and diesel power generators, the loss of road transport consumption and petrochemical feedstocks mostly balances out the production hit.Refineries typically recover slower than production, especially as they’re more used to coming back from hurricanes than cold weather, meaning that profit margins for making fuel from crude could be strong in the weeks ahead, Bruce said.Texas Power Seller Sounds Off as Prices Stay Sky High After Supply Returns (12 a.m.)Griddy, the Texas power retailer that fully exposes its customers to real-time swings in wholesale power markets, said it plans to fight regulators who kept prices high Thursday night even as supply returned to normal.On Monday, the state’s Public Utility Commission ordered its main grid to keep prices near the cap of $9,000 per megawatt-hour to incentivize as much generation as possible to come onto the grid amid shortages that caused millions to lose power in rolling blackouts.As of Thursday night, those prices remained at the cap even though enough generation had come back online to return power to nearly everyone in the state. There were about 9 gigawatts of excess capacity as of 11 p.m. local time, according to grid data.According to Griddy, a typical home would pay $640 a day for power at current prices, compared with $2 in normal times. The company earlier this week told all of its 29,000 customers to try to find other providers amid escalating wholesale costs.Biden Tells Texas Governor Federal Aid is Ready (11 p.m.)President Joe Biden told Abbott that the federal government will continue to work hand-in-hand with state and local authorities in Texas to bring relief to families affected by severe winter weather and power outages, according to a press release from the White House.Biden also said he planned to instruct additional federal agencies to look into other steps that could be taken to support the state. The federal government is ready with additional assistance for Texas or any other states that need it as severe storms continue, he said.Texas Grid Says 36 GW of Generators Remain Offline (9 p.m.)About 36 gigawatts of generation, 21.4 of which is fossil fuel-based, remained offline Thursday night, the Electric Reliability Council of Texas said in a press release.The state’s main grid operator said enough capacity has returned that it hasn’t needed to force rolling blackouts. Some limited outages may be possible Thursday night or Friday morning to keep the grid stable as demand comes back, it said.Most customers who were without power Thursday evening fell into one of three categories, it said:Areas where local power lines were down because of the stormAreas taken offline for rolling blackouts that need to be manually restoredLarge industrial facilities that voluntarily went offline to reduce system demand.Mexico Wants to Stop Texas Gas-Hoarding Plan (7:50 p.m.)Mexico has asked the U.S. ambassador to help make sure the nation isn’t impacted by a Texas decision to force local gas producers to offer their fuel to in-state buyers before exporting it.“We are doing our diplomatic work so that this doesn’t happen,” President Andrés Manuel López Obrador of Mexico said at a news conference on Thursday. “This wouldn’t just affect Mexico — it would also affect other states in the Union.”Texas is the biggest gas producer in the U.S., and Governor Greg Abbott on Wednesday signed an order restricting gas sales through Feb. 21 amid the state’s widespread power outages.U.S. pipeline gas exports to Mexico plunged by about 2 billion cubic feet a day earlier this week after a pipeline outage, contributing to power outages south of the border.Restarting Texas’ Damaged Oil Refineries Is Going to Take Weeks (6:50 p.m.)Four of the largest refineries in Texas are discovering widespread damage from the deep freeze that crippled the state and expect to be down for weeks of repairs, raising the potential for prolonged fuel shortages that could spread across the country.Exxon Mobil Corp.’s Baytown and Beaumont plants, Marathon Petroleum Corp.’s Galveston Bay refinery and Total SE’s Port Arthur facility all face at least several weeks to resume normal operations, people familiar with the situation said. Gasoline prices at the pump could reach $3 a gallon in May as long outages crimp supply ahead of the driving season, said Patrick DeHaan, head of petroleum analysis for retailer tracker GasBuddy.The cold snap and power outages roiling energy markets affected more than 20 oil refineries in Texas, Louisiana and Oklahoma. Crude-processing capacity fell by about 5.5 million barrels a day, according to Amrita Sen, chief oil analyst for consultant Energy Aspects Ltd.Automakers Shut or Slow Several Plants Because of Weather (5 p.m.)Volkswagen AG said its Chattanooga factory in Tennessee, which builds the Passat sedan and Atlas SUV, will have a temporary production suspension Friday due to the inclement weather’s continued impact on supply chain operations.Ford Motor Co. said the unseasonably cold weather throughout much of North America continues to affect operations at some of its plants in the region, from Kentucky to Michigan. Its Hermosillo assembly plant in Mexico is down due to the gas shortage caused by the cold. The company has asked its Texas dealers to deploy more than 400 of its newly redesigned F-150 pickup equipped with an on-board electric generator.Texas Governor Blasts Grid Manager, Demands Power Plant Upgrades (4:43 p.m)Texas Governor Greg Abbott demanded that lawmakers make winterization of power plants mandatory under state law after four days of widespread blackouts and water shortages.Abbott harshly criticized the state’s grid manager, known as Ercot, and its CEO Bill Magness for what he said was a failure to provide a realistic assessment of Texas’s generating capacity prior to the unprecedented cold snap.“Ercot has failed on each of these measures that they said they had undertaken,” Abbott said during a media briefing on Thursday. “Texans deserve answers.”The Republican governor also said he has asked the Joe Biden administration for a major disaster declaration, partly because such a measure would enable individual Texans to seek reimbursement for residential damage such as burst water pipes.RWE Sees 2021 EBITDA Hurt on Texas Weather Conditions (4:18 p.m.)RWE expects 2021 Ebitda from its onshore wind and solar segment to be negatively affected in the range of a low to mid three-digit million euro amount iue to extreme weather conditions in Texas that led to outages of the company’s wind turbines and high electricity prices.RWE currently has to buy electricity at abnormally high pricing conditions following an order of the Public Utility Commission of Texas directing the Electric Reliability Council of Texas to reflect scarcity prices. It said the final assessment of the actual impact is not yet possible at this time.Texas Oil Patch Is Starting to Resume Operations After Cold Snap (3:53 p.m.)The Texas oil patch is slowly restarting wells after a deep freeze that swept through the region shut a record amount of U.S. crude output.Marathon Oil Corp., Devon Energy Corp. and Verdun Oil Co LLC have begun using restored power from local grids or generators to restart oil output across the Eagle Ford shale basin that was shut by the frigid weather, according to people familiar with the matter, who asked not to be identified because the information isn’t public. The companies began work to resume operations late Wednesday.Nobody can say exactly how long it will take to restore all supply lost. But oil traders and executives have said they hope most of the production lost will return within days as temperatures rise and power becomes available. They’ve warned that a small percentage may be shut down longer due to the need for repairs.No LNG Tankers Are Loading at U.S. Export Terminals Amid Freeze (3:30 p.m.)Right now there are no liquefied natural gas tankers docked and loading at any of the six U.S. export terminals. That’s a highly unusual situation for the world’s third-largest shipper of the fuel and an indication of how far LNG trade flows have been upended by the recent freeze.Shipping data compiled by Bloomberg shows the absence of vessels after two tankers left U.S. terminals Thursday. The arctic blast hit that hit Texas Sunday slashed gas supplies just as demand rocketed.Whole System Came Minutes From Meltdown, Texas Grid Manager Says (3 p.m.)As generating units failed Sunday night between 11 p.m. and midnight, the whole system came just minutes from melting down into total failure as power plants failed and people’s power usage rose, Ercot CEO Bill Magness said in a news briefing Thursday.“One of the reasons that operators have to act to arrest the frequency is if they say, “Well, you know, let’s wait another minute and see what happens.’ What happens in that next minute might be three big units come off and then you’re sunk,” said Magness.The frequency was dropping and the operators had to act immediately. “It was seconds and minutes given the amount of generation that was coming off the system at the same time that the demand was still going up significantly.”Cruz Returns to Texas Under Fire for Cancun Trip Amid Blackouts (2:34 p.m.)Senator Ted Cruz is returning to Texas after coming under harsh criticism for flying to Cancun, Mexico with his family while the state he represents is dealing with widespread power outages in the wake of a historic winter storm.The Republican lawmaker said he was returning to Houston on Thursday after flying to the Mexican resort city the day before.Texas’ Second-in-Command Makes Rare Defense of Wind, Solar (2:24 p.m.)Texas Lieutenant Governor Dan Patrick said wind and solar have been unfairly blamed for the unprecedented power failures that have paralyzed much of the second-largest U.S. state for four days.Patrick, a Republican in the nation’s biggest oil-producing state, told Fox News on Thursday that windmills and solar arrays weren’t alone in going offline and make up too small a portion of the energy baseload to take the blame.“We had a breakdown everywhere -- frozen water lines, frozen gas line, frozen equipment,” Patrick said. A state senate investigation into the weather-driven power outages that swept Texas will begin next week, Patrick said.Solar Key to Restoring Texas Power, Grid Operator Says (12:57 p.m.)Texas’s grid operator credited solar power with the fast restoration of power that began Wednesday afternoon.“We had quite a bit of solar generation online,” Dan Woodfin, director of system operations at the Electric Reliability Council of Texas, told reporters Thursday. “When the solar generation was online, we started trying to bring back a lot of the load.”As transmission operators began restoring thousands of megawatts of power to customers Wednesday, they discovered demand was lower than expected because many businesses were shut down, Woodfin said. “We realized at that point we could start to go much faster. We started telling the transmission operators to restore pretty much as fast as you can, because we can keep up with it in terms of generation,” he said.Grid Operators Unprepared for Extreme Weather: EPRI (11:51 a.m.)An electric industry think tank is warning that grid operators don’t adequately plan for extreme weather events like the cold snap wreaking havoc in Texas, disruptions that are happening more often and growing more severe as the climate changes.The Electric Power Research Institute in January released a report saying the industry “systematically understates” the likelihood and severity of such events, which can affect multiple fossil fuel and renewable power plants at the same time. Instead, they have been treated as anomalies, and that must change, EPRI Chief Executive Officer Arshad Mansoor said Thursday. The institute studies issues important to electric and gas utilities and rarely criticizes the industry.“EPRI scientists and engineers concluded that grid operator planning processes, including resource adequacy planning, typically don’t consider extreme climate scenarios that a resilient grid must be able to handle going forward,” he said, in a statement. “Traditional planning processes do not represent how resources actually perform under extreme conditions.”Cameron LNG Declares Force Majeure as Freeze Affects Loadings (11:24 a.m.)Cameron LNG, an export plant in Louisiana, has declared force majeure on cargo loadings after the cold blast squeezed gas supplies, according to people with knowledge of the matter.The force majeure covers cancellation of at least one cargo for prompt loading, and delay for another two or three loadings, one of the people said. Cameron LNG didn’t immediately reply to a request for comment.Texas Sees ‘Glide Path’ to Restoring Power (11:12 a.m.)Operators of Texas’s power grid said they see a “glide path” to restoring power in the state. Homes and businesses that originally lost power are being restored, officials said during a briefing Thursday. The total load, or power demand, on the system rose to 55.4 gigawatts, the highest since the blackouts began.There is, however, ice damage on the grid in Central Texas.Texas Power Outages Fall Below 600,000 (8:40 a.m.)The lights are finally coming back on in Texas, albeit slowly. About 525,000 homes and businesses in Texas were without power Thursday morning as power plants have gradually come back online, according to Poweroutage.us, which aggregates data from utility websites. That’s down from more than 3 million on Wednesday.On Tuesday, about 4 million homes and businesses were in the dark. That’s nearly 12 million people based on the size of the average household in the state.Electricity Demand Starts to Rise as Blackouts Improve (6:20 a.m.)Power demand on the Ercot grid is starting to pick up signaling that fewer blackouts are needed to keep the system stable. Demand rose above 50 gigawatts, for the first time since Monday showing a marked improvement from the same time on Wednesday.A large nuclear unit in South Texas has increased output to a level where it can feed electricity into the grid, providing extra supply, NRC data show.Power capacity online showed signs of improvement as a nuclear reactor in South Texas ramped up production andFor more articles like this, please visit us at bloomberg.comSubscribe now to stay ahead with the most trusted business news source.©2021 Bloomberg L.P.

The Texas oil patch is slowly restarting wells after a deep freeze that swept through the region shut a record amount of US crude output.

DVN | Complete Devon Energy Corp. stock news by MarketWatch. View real-time stock prices and stock quotes for a full financial overview.

Oil’s recent rise above $60 a barrel will test the willpower of shale companies that pledged to slow drilling and repair balance sheets battered by the pandemic.

Devon Energy Corp (NYSE:DVN) Q4 2020 Earnings Conference Call February 17, 2021, 10:00 ET Company Participants Scott Coody - VP, IR Richard Muncrief - President, CEO & Director Clay...

Mailing Address 333 W. SHERIDAN AVENUE OKLAHOMA CITY OK 73102 Business Address 333 W. SHERIDAN AVENUE OKLAHOMA CITY OK 73102 4055528183 CIK : 0001090012 (see ...

/PRNewswire/ -- EnLink Midstream, LLC (NYSE: ENLC) (EnLink) today reported financial results for the fourth quarter and full-year of 2020 and provided 2021...

DALLAS, Feb. 16, 2021 /PRNewswire/ -- EnLink Midstream, LLC (NYSE:ENLC) (EnLink) today reported financial results for the fourth quarter and full-year of ...

Pre-open movers U.S. stock futures traded higher in early pre-market trade, ahead of earnings from Occidental Petroleum Corporation (NYSE: OXY) and Devon ...

Seven companies in the oil and gas industry have been designated a Best Place to Work for LGBTQ Equality, the Human Rights Campaign Foundation has revealed...

Shale producers swear this time is different.