Again

With oil production booming in the Permian Basin of West Texas, projects are being developed to serve producers wanting to get their oil to Houston. But going west on a converted portion of Kinder Morgan’s El Paso Natural Gas (EPNG) system could one day be an option, too.

Majors and national oil companies (NOC) are about to go shopping again, and their most likely targets are companies such as Anadarko Petroleum Corp., EOG Resources Inc., Whiting Petroleum Corp., Kodiak Oil & Gas Corp. and Forest Oil Corp., Wells Fargo Securities analysts said in a note last week.

Majors and national oil companies (NOC) are about to go shopping again, and their most likely targets are companies such as Anadarko Petroleum Corp., EOG Resources Inc., Whiting Petroleum Corp., Kodiak Oil & Gas Corp. and Forest Oil Corp., Wells Fargo Securities analysts said in a note Monday.

Total gross withdrawals of domestic natural gas jumped to 28.58 Tcf in 2011, a 6.5% increase from 26.84 Tcf in 2010, and are on pace to easily surpass those numbers again this year, according to the U.S. Energy Information Administration’s Monthly Energy Review for September.

Chesapeake Energy Corp. CEO Aubrey McClendon, who Thursday spoke to analysts publicly for the first time in months beyond the Oklahoma City boardroom, said the company remains on track to sell up to $14 billion of assets by the end of the year, including a package of properties in the Permian Basin. He’s also confident that even as the company continues to turn toward more oily production, natural gas prices will strengthen in the coming months.

As the deadline for moving proposed bills out of finance committees came and went Thursday, the California state legislature again gave up on measures designed to more closely regulate hydraulic fracturing (fracking).

A sinkhole in a Louisiana bayou that caused four pipelines to be shut in this month expanded again on Thursday morning, swallowing more land as workers continue to assemble a rig to drill an exploratory well at the site.

Although there is no direct link to the catastrophic San Bruno pipeline rupture and explosion nearly two years ago, Pacific Gas and Electric Co. again was placed on the defensive by local news reports Tuesday suggesting that as recently as four years ago the combination utility was encouraging workers to defer a lot of distribution pipeline leak repairs.

Under a state law (AB 118) providing up to $100 million annually, the California Energy Commission (CEC) opened its pocketbook again, doling out another $1.7 million for 15 different energy projects, including a number of natural gas vehicle (NGV) programs. More than $500,000 of the grants went to what the CEC called “green transportation” advancements.