Agenda

A citizens group opposed to gas drilling within the city of Dallas is rounding up supporters to attend a City Plan Commission meeting Thursday at which commissioners are expected to reconsider a previous denial of permits to drill that are being sought by Trinity East Energy LLC.

For the first time in 22 years a surviving relic of Canadian energy trade regulation — volume control on natural gas and oil exports — has popped up on the national agenda for review and change. The renewed interest comes when British Columbia is poised to become the departure point for tankers bound for Asian markets with liquefied Canadian gas.

For the first time in 22 years a surviving relic of Canadian energy trade regulation — volume control on natural gas and oil exports — has popped up on the national agenda for review and change. The renewed interest comes when British Columbia is poised to become the departure point for tankers bound for Asian markets with liquefied Canadian gas.

The climax of a three-day “Stop the Frack Attack” anti-hydraulic fracturing (fracking) rally in Washington, DC, on Saturday had been advertised by its organizers as an event that would bring “thousands of people from across the U.S. and around the globe” to protest the practice.

Pennsylvania is reportedly planning to resume paying its dues to the Delaware River Basin Commission (DRBC) for the upcoming fiscal year (FY) 2012-2013, but New York wants to continue cutting its contribution to the watershed protection organization.

The Commodity Futures Trading Commission (CFTC) has struck from its meeting agenda Thursday a much-anticipated and widely criticized final rule to define “swap dealers” and “major swap participants.” The rule is one of the most contentious before the Commission and would lay the groundwork for the agency to proceed with other regulatory reforms under the Dodd-Frank Wall Street Reform Act.

Natural gas, which had taken a backseat to numerous issues during the first three years of the Obama administration, may be poised to move toward the top of the agenda in the president’s State of the Union speech.

The value of fugitive natural gas and condensate air emissions in the Barnett Shale of North Texas is about $52 million a year, according to research paid for by a clean air group, which asserts that “simple air pollution control devices” would capture this lost revenue if they were installed in the nine-county nonattainment area around Dallas-Fort Worth (DFW).

With natural gas now front and center on President Obama’s energy agenda (see Shale Daily, March 31), his administration has called for a broad-based panel to be formed to examine potential risks associated with hydraulic fracturing (fracking).