Rich Nemec

FERC’s enforcement division has grown from five to to 500 employees since the market meltdown in 2000-2001, staffing a market monitoring center that closely follows electric and natural gas prices, tracking apparent aberrations for any evidence of market manipulation. Last winter’s polar vortex didn’t make their job any easier.

In the next five to seven years, natural gas prices will trend upward as global oil prices move down, the chief economist for The CME Group, Blu Putnam, told an energy industry meeting in Chicago on Tuesday.

With robust production growth in the Appalachian Basin and extensive infrastructure expansions on both sides of the U.S. and Canadian borders, the Midcontinent and Gulf Coast will be awash in natural gas over the next five years, according to three industry experts who spoke Tuesday at an energy forum in Chicago.

Houston-based OsComp, promoting itself as “redefining natural gas,” is moving aggressively into North Dakota’s Williston Basin to turn Bakken Shale flared wellhead natural gas into profits by transforming it into compressed natural gas (CNG) for oilfield, industrial and transportation uses.

With robust production growth in the Appalachian Basin and extensive infrastructure expansions on both sides of the U.S. and Canadian border, the Midcontinent figures to become awash in natural gas during the next five years, according to three industry experts who spoke Tuesday at an energy forum in Chicago.

Building on a joint U.S.-Canada government cooperation plan issued at the end of last month, the Canadian Gas Association (CGA) and the Canadian Natural Gas Vehicle Alliance (CNGVA) have pledged their “full support” for increased cooperation between the two nations on efforts to promote use of natural gas vehicles (NGV).

Plans for a major natural gas-fed fertilizer plant in North Dakota were re-energized Friday when the board of directors for the sponsoring agricultural cooperative voted to move ahead with plans for the $3 billion project that bids to soak up some of the wellhead gas being flared as part of the Bakken shale boom. The project had been on hold because of construction and labor cost concerns.

Colorado Gov. John Hickenlooper on Monday named a 19-member statewide task force to examine land use and state and local rules in permitting oil and natural gas facilities. This culminates a compromise approach to a simmering state political issue that Hickenlooper’s office patched together last month (see Shale Daily,Aug. 5).

A flood of proposed pipeline capacity along with liquefied natural gas (LNG) exports will spur demand toward convergence with booming supply between 2025 and 2030 and driving U.S. economic growth, several natural gas experts told an industry group in Chicago Monday.