Committee of Chief Risk Officers Framework Expected to Measurably Reduce Energy Marketers' Collateral Requirements.

WASHINGTON -- Please replace the release with the following corrected version due to updates in the third paragraph.

The corrected release reads:

COMMITTEE OF CHIEF RISK OFFICERS FRAMEWORK EXPECTED TO MEASURABLY REDUCE ENERGY MARKETERS' COLLATERAL REQUIREMENTS

--Position paper addresses five primary factors influencing liquidity requirements

--Recommendations aimed at S&P's Liquidity Surveys

The Committee of Chief Risk Officers has developed, with a continuing dialog with Standard & Poor's Ratings Services, a model framework designed to standardize and clarify best practice methodologies for assessing the financial liquidity strengths of energy companies.

Many of the recommendations could be incorporated into S&P's quarterly Financial Liquidity Survey request as early as the first quarter of 2005. The current version of the Survey has imposed what many energy company financial and risk officers assert is an unfair and unrealistic assessment of liquidity requirements. In most cases, the best practice methodologies detailed in the CCRO paper result in a significant reduction in collateral assessments versus the current version of S&P's approach.

Standard & Poor's said it expects to publish interim comments on some of the issues raised in the CCRO paper within the next several days.

"We are pleased with the relationship the working group has established with S&P and look forward to presenting our recommendations and then seeing them adopted throughout the financial community," said CCRO Financial Liquidity Working Group Co-Chair Andrew Sunderman, Vice-President and Chief Risk Officer at Williams Companies in Tulsa, Oklahoma.

"While every energy company's finances are unique," Sunderman added, "a new financial liquidity framework that more realistically reflects a company's liquidity requirement will improve transparency for trading partners and credit rating analysts."

Khalid Abedin, the other CCRO Working Group Co-Chair and Vice President of Credit Risk Management for Baltimore-based Constellation Energy, said the working group focused first on evaluating historical commodity price data to develop market stress scenarios that represent stressed commodity price market conditions more effectively than assessments now widely used.

"We compiled results of a CCRO-survey to support our premise that contracts with 'adequate assurance clauses' should require significantly less than 100% collateral," said Abedin.

"The industry and ratings community are in new territory here," said CCRO Executive Director Bob Anderson. "The robust analysis and practical recommendations jointly developed by this working group will prove exceptionally valuable to investors, energy companies, and rating agencies alike. I believe we'll see more such stakeholder collaboration from CCRO projects in the future."

The energy companies most active in the CCRO's Liquidity Working Group include CCRO members Williams, Constellation Energy, El Paso, Cinergy, PSEG, and APS. Avista Corp. was among the guest participants in this effort.

The CCRO is a diverse, international coalition of energy companies developing best practices to strengthen and standardize risk management and financial management practices in the physical and financial trading and marketing of electricity and natural gas for investors, regulators, financial institutions and other energy companies. Compliance with CCRO's best practice recommendations by its members is voluntary. More information is available at www.ccro.org or can be obtained by emailing the CCRO at [e-mail].