Joe Fisher

The grounding of Royal Dutch Shell plc's Mobile Offshore Drilling Unit Kulluk on the eastern coast of Sitkalidak Island, Alaska, in late December 2012 was mainly due to a failure of personnel to assess and manage the risks of towing the rig in heavy seas, the U.S. Coast Guard (USCG) said in a report on the incident issued Thursday.

Virginia's governor has signed into law legislation (SB 519) intended to incentivize the development of natural gas infrastructure so that residents and businesses can better take advantage of low-cost shale and coalbed methane gas supplies.

Chevron Phillips Chemical Co. LP broke ground this week for its U.S. Gulf Coast (USGC) petrochemicals project at the Cedar Bayou plant in Baytown, TX. The project includes a 1.5 million metric ton/year (3.3 billion pounds/year) ethane cracker to be built at Cedar Bayou and two 500,000 metric ton/year (1.1 billion pounds/year) capacity polyethylene facilities…

Cheniere Energy Inc.'s Corpus Christi Liquefaction LLC has secured its second foundation customer — Spain's Endesa Generacion SA — for its liquefied natural gas (LNG) export terminal project on the Texas coast.

Crestwood Midstream Partners LP plans to further expand its Willow Lake Project in the Permian’s Delaware Basin with conversion of a portion of its Las Animas gas gathering system to rich gas service and construction of a cryogenic gas processing plant.

FERC has been called upon once again to consider the potential upstream effects of authorizing facilities to export liquefied domestic natural gas as it weighs the environmental impacts of another terminal project. But one energy analyst thinks this appeal, like those before it, will be a non-starter, too.

Magellan Midstream Partners LP plans to construct a condensate splitter at its terminal in Corpus Christi, TX, under a fee-based, take-or-pay agreement with Trafigura AG. The project includes construction of more than one million bbl of storage, dock improvements and two additional truck rack bays at Magellan’s terminal as well as pipeline connectivity between Magellan’s…

An oil industry-funded study says allowing export of domestic crude oil would create thousands of jobs and be a boon to consumers and the U.S. economy.

North American shale natural gas production will grow to 64 Bcf/d by 2022, led by the Marcellus Shale, which will be responsible for 17 Bcf/d of that total, and maybe more, according to a new analysis by Ziff Energy.