Opinion ID: 492011
Heading Depth: 2
Heading Rank: 1

Heading: Pipeline Sales Service Issues.

Text: 326 A number of parties assert that FERC acted unlawfully in promulgating Order No. 436 without addressing various problems presented by pipeline sales service. The challenged omissions include: failure to completely bar minimum commodity bills (Brief of Columbia Gas Transmission Corp.); refusal to extend Order No. 436 to the transportation component of sales service (Brief of Peoples Gas Light & Coke Co. and North Shore Gas Co.); failure to eliminate sole supplier provisions from pipeline sales tariffs (Brief of Central Illinois Light Co.). 327 As the Notice of Proposed Rulemaking made clear from the start, however, FERC intended Order No. 436 to be a comprehensive resolution only of transportation issues. In order to accomplish its goal of uncoupling transportation services from sales service effectively and in conformity with this court's holdings in the MPC cases, FERC addressed certain issues presented by sales service, notably CD conversion/reduction and the producer-pipeline purchase contracts. As we noted above, consideration of these issues was in all likelihood essential to FERC's task. Whenever possible, however, FERC has left sales issues for resolution outside of Order No. 436. This necessarily causes a certain incompleteness. But all natural gas issues are related to each other. That the web is seamless does not require an agency to reweave the whole whenever it reweaves a part. An agency is entitled to the highest deference in deciding priorities among issues, including the sequence and grouping in which it tackles them. Cf. Heckler v. Chaney, 470 U.S. 821, 831-32, 105 S.Ct. 1649, 1655-56, 84 L.Ed.2d 714 (1985). We see no abuse of discretion in FERC's decisions to exclude the specified items from this page of its agenda. 328