Tightening the screws. Getting squared away. Toeing the line. Asking for letters of credit. Back to basics. Get it? The speed with which certain energy companies have gotten the message about credit ratings, debt-to-equity ratios and liquidity has been impressive. One good thing to come out of the massive Enron-Andersen scandal is that it lit a fire under many chief executive officers. They have embarked on a mad scramble to overhaul their balance sheets. It's one of the most far-reaching seasons of spring cleaning we've ever seen. Billions of dollars worth of assets have been changing hands and billions more dollars have been raised in the markets. Dynegy issued shares to net $750 million and reduced spending by $500 million, after buying Enron's Northern Natural Gas Pipeline for $950 million. It will also roll over some assets into a new public master limited partnership, raising several hundred million more. El Paso sold $750 million of common stock, reduced capex, increased equity, renegotiated debt covenants and has put some $2 billion of assets for sale. Calpine has sold $5 billion of convertible senior notes since December, dropped some of its expansion plans and canceled some turbine orders. Williams sold 30- and 10-year notes to raise $1.5 billion and eliminated very threatening credit-rating triggers found in its telecom subsidiary. It will reduce capex by $1.2 billion as a result of selling a real crown jewel, the Kern River Gas Transmission Co. Kern River is a 926-mile line that is doubling capacity. When the expansion is finished in 2003, it will be able to move some 1.7 billion cubic feet of gas a day from the Rockies and Canada to California and Arizona. Kern River was acquired by MidAmerican Energy Holdings, which itself is 75% owned by Berkshire Hathaway Inc. The price was $450 million in cash, assumption of $510 million in debt and $275 million of convertible preferred stock that would give MidAmerica 3% of Williams. It's a positive that the buyer turned out to be Warren Buffett. The billionaire has always vowed that his holding company, Berkshire, will buy only businesses he can understand-the ironic opposite of the complexity that Enron has come to represent. Hence, some of the companies Buffett owns include Dairy Queen, the Tony Lama, Nocona and Justin boot companies, Benjamin Moore Paints, Helzberg Diamonds, Executive Jet, a few furniture makers, and Geico, the auto insurance giant. This is interesting because it is not the only energy asset Buffett owns. MidAmerican owns CalEnergy Generation and Northern Electric in the U.K., and is supposedly looking to buy more utility assets. Meanwhile, what of the gas producers upon which these companies depend? You can count on Apache Corp. chairman Raymond Plank to jump into the fray. In February he testified before a House Energy and Commerce subcommittee investigating what affect Enron's collapse may have had on the way energy markets work. He and several others who spoke said that fortunately, markets continued without disruption, a healthy sign. But we may have just squeaked by. A major factor that "saved" us was that the economy was down and winter temperatures were up, thus reducing our need for natural gas at that critical time. The scenario in the fourth quarter could be very different if operators continue to lay down their gas rigs and this coming fall and winter are colder. Already, prognosticators have begun talking about the return of El Niño, the global weather phenomenon that wreaked frosty havoc with winters a few years ago. Plank sent a letter to industry colleagues in March, reiterating his suggestions to Congress for a fix to volatile markets that make it difficult for producers to analyze, decide and act with regard to oil and gas drilling. He suggests that the government promote greater market transparency by collecting and disseminating real-time data on gas supply, demand and prices, with market participants penalized if they do not comply promptly and accurately. He wants regulated pipelines and their unregulated affiliates to be legally and geographically separated, with their dealings limited to real transactions with real money changing hands. He wants unregulated online energy trading platforms to be regulated just as the exchanges such as Nymex are. He wants mark-to-market accounting of energy trading activity to end and instead, require traders to book their revenues and profits when they are realized. (Enron would book profit streams that were not going to be realized until years later.) Finally, Plank suggests certain capital requirements to assure traders can deliver the gas and electricity behind their contracts. Plank says that never has there been such uncertainty in the future of the natural gas industry. But if Buffett, who loves to buy undervalued assets and grow them, is buying interstate gas pipelines, maybe we can assume the direction is turning positive.