2013

The price for Utica Shale acreage is rising at a surprising clip if a lease agreement signed this week by the Board of Commissioners of Columbiana County, OH, and an agent for Chesapeake Energy Corp. is any indication.

Archie W. Dunham, 73, the former chairman of ConocoPhillips, was tapped Thursday as Chesapeake Energy Corp.’s independent nonexecutive chairman. Dunham, who also was CEO of predecessor Conoco Inc., has had “no previous relationship” with the company, the board said.

The Pennsylvania Department of Environmental Protection (DEP) has launched a natural gas vehicle (NGV) website to help public- and private-sector fleet operators decide if they want to convert part or all of their operations to NGVs. The website offers information on both compressed natural gas (CNG) and liquefied natural gas (LNG) options. Inspired by the state’s booming shale gas play, Pennsylvania’s new state law (Act 13) passed earlier this year (see Shale Daily, May 11) authorized DEP to establish the Natural Gas Energy Development Program to distribute $20 million in grants during a three-year period to help pay for the purchase and conversion costs of NGVs. The website (www.dep.state.pa.us) section on the “Natural Gas Vehicle Grant Program” offers more details on the grants as well as information on NGV conversions and fueling.

ProWater, a Sustainable Environmental Technologies Corp. (SET) subsidiary, said Wednesday it has started drilling a new saltwater disposal (SWD) well in North Dakota’s portion of the Bakken Shale and will test a new automated system to support shale oil drilling in the play.

In about 18 months the U.S. Geological Survey (USGS) should be able to tell the energy industry, and everyone else, just how productive the Three Forks formation, which lies below the Bakken Shale, might be.

TransCanada’s ANR Pipeline Co. is holding a nonbinding open season for potential expansion of receipt capacity on its Lebanon Lateral in eastern Indiana and western Ohio. The project would carry growing production from the Marcellus and Utica shales, TransCanada said.

Inergy Midstream LP, UGI Energy Services Inc. and Capitol Energy Ventures Corp., a unit of WGL Holdings Inc., are conducting a non binding open season for shippers to transport natural gas volumes on the proposed Commonwealth Pipeline, which would carry Marcellus and Utica Shale production to market.

A district court judge in Texas has ruled that oil and natural gas production equipment used “below ground” is exempt from state sales taxes on extraction equipment.

Climate change impacts are lessened when power plants burn natural gas instead of coal, but the same is not necessarily true when vehicles burn natural gas instead of traditional fuels because methane leakage more than offsets the clean-burning benefits of gas, according to a methane leakage model developed by the Environmental Defense Fund (EDF) and university researchers. However, the gas industry countered that the model relies on “outdated and incomplete” data.