Areas

Alaska’s two Republican senators have introduced a bill that calls for conducting lease sales in the state’s offshore areas of the Beaufort Sea and Cook Inlet, and would reverse a decision made during the waning days of the Obama administration to withdraw leasing areas of the Arctic’s Outer Continental Shelf (OCS).

The heads of three oil and natural gas trade associations said they would use the first of several public scoping meetings as a platform to urge federal officials to expand the areas under consideration for offshore oil and gas leasing.

Hi-Crush Partners LP, which produces and markets Northern White sand used as proppant in hydraulic fracturing (fracking), may see demand rise this year even as rigs are dropped because production rates are more important than ever, a top executive said last week.

With California Gov. Jerry Brown on Tuesday requesting that the three-county South Napa earthquake area be designated as a disaster area by the Obama administration, officials for Pacific Gas and Electric Co. (PG&E) are calling the combination utility’s coordinated quake response an indicator of how far it has come in improving its safety and emergency responsiveness.

Eleven oil and gas trade associations have signed a letter urging the Interior Department’s Bureau of Ocean Energy Management (BOEM) to make new areas of the Atlantic and Pacific oceans, as well as the eastern Gulf of Mexico (GOM), available for leasing.

July natural gas is set to open 3 cents lower Tuesday morning at $4.68 as traders admit Thursday’s price advance may have been a little overdone and anticipate volatile weather-driven trading in the weeks ahead. Overnight oil markets were narrowly mixed.

As it looks to replenish natural gas supplies on its system, Columbia Pipeline Group (CPG) said its current storage inventory is off by more than one-third compared with the same period last year. Meanwhile, some of its customers are taking advantage of lower gas prices by over-scheduling deliveries.

Operators may argue that unconventional drilling using hydraulic fracturing (fracking) doesn't require a lot of the overall water used in the United States. But to paraphrase former Speaker of the House Tip O'Neill: all water is local.

The nation's energy boom, stoked by technological advances both onshore and offshore, drove significant economic growth for the oil and gas industry, which also fueled a corresponding population boom in resource-rich areas such as North Dakota and Texas between 2007 and 2012, according to the U.S. Census Bureau.