Alberta

Canadian natural gas supplies will still last a century if all proposals for new tanker shipments to Asia succeed, the National Energy Board (NEB) has been assured.

Amid growing optimism that the energy economic cycle is taking a favorable turn, Canadian independent natural gas and oil producers are resuming building up supplies, largely by spreading the use of horizontal drilling and hydraulic fracturing.

Alberta will all but drop off the North American map as a merchant of natural gas to markets beyond its borders over the next 10 years, predicts the province’s supply development authority.

After completing 8,900 horizontal hydraulically fractured wells since the end of 2007, Alberta industry leaders are searching for a community-relations formula that will be as effective as the drilling technology.

While bullish Canadian financial analysts and stockbrokers project 2013-2014 heating season prices into a rosy future, one of the country's biggest dependents on natural gas revenues is sticking to modest expectations.

While natural gas prices and production languish in Western Canada, demand for liquid byproducts has made drilling and building extraction plant and pipeline capacity into a growth specialty.

Natural gas supplies are on the rise in British Columbia (BC) even though drilling, slowed by weak prices, has barely scratched the surface of the province’s northern shale deposits.

Canada’s top natural gas transmission and distribution companies have concluded a deal to pave the way for growing imports of shale gas supplies from the United States into Ontario and Quebec over at least the next 16 years.

The Alberta Energy Regulator (AER) has taken on additional regulatory functions, including responsibility for the Public Lands Act and Part 8 of the Mines and Minerals Act for all oil, natural gas, oil sands and coal development in the province, and has launched an online private surface agreements registry and expanded public notice of applications, the agency said Monday.