Practice Areas & Industries: Patton Boggs LLP

Practice/Industry Group Overview

The lawyers in the Patton Boggs Energy Practice provide comprehensive legal services to clients in virtually every sector of the energy industry, including oil and gas, pipeline, and service companies, electric utilities, and coal mining, and both in the United States and internationally. Our attorneys help our clients tackle energy matters¿whether transactional, regulatory, or litigation¿by understanding their businesses and partnering with them to find creative solutions to the complex challenges that arise in the energy field.

Representative Matters:

Fought aggressively to protect former electric customers of Enron in the wake of the largest financial and political scandal in history of electric utility regulation. Our persistent efforts to uncover evidence of electric market manipulation by Enron led to the release of audio tapes of Enron phone calls that have been widely publicized by major news organizations throughout the country.

Served as lead counsel in permitting of major offshore arctic Alaska oil exploration project and successfully defended four separate permit challenges initiated in the 9th Circuit, Federal District Court, Interior Board of Land Appeals and Alaska Superior Court.

Successfully represented a purchaser of oil and gas properties in an arbitration concerning the extent of environmental impacts and the cost of remediation in order to obtain a reduction of the purchase price. The opposing party had not agreed that the purchase and sale agreement threshold for price reduction was met. The arbitrator agreed with our client that it was not only met, but that a price reduction was required.

Currently serve as federal energy counsel to the administrative agent for 19 lenders with upstream ownership interests in 3000 MWs of generation on FERC-compliance and jurisdictional issues; structured the ownership arrangements of this $1.2 billion deal to avoid FERC jurisdiction for the lenders. Also serve as federal energy counsel to the project companies on FERC regulatory requirements, PUHCA issues, interconnection payment disputes, natural gas supply issues, "reliability must-run" contract issues and the on-going market design for locational installed capacity in New England.

Successfully represented industry intervenor in repeated environmental group challenges to offshore oil exploration and development project in Cook Inlet.

Advise a large French bank on federal energy regulatory issues related to its investments in power generating facilities across the U.S.