Auction

Natural gas from Argentina’s province Neuquén, home to most of the Vaca Muerta deposit, fetched $1.79/MMBtu on average in the latest online auction held by Argentina’s online gas market Mercado Electrónico del Gas (Megsa).

A cadre of 30 oil and gas producers submitted 257 total bids in Wednesday’s Gulf of Mexico (GOM) region-wide auction, with the Mississippi Canyon drawing the highest bid and a unit of Royal Dutch Shell plc far and away outbidding everybody.

A federal judge ruled late Tuesday that the Interior Department’s Bureau of Land Management (BLM) did an inadequate job of considering the effects of climate change when it authorized oil and gas lease sales in the West, and he ordered a temporary halt to drilling on more than 300,000 acres in Wyoming.

The Interior Department is planning yet another region-wide lease sale in the Gulf of Mexico (GOM) next March, when it plans to auction about 78 million acres for oil and natural gas development.

Business leaders in Mexico’s northern Gulf state of Tamaulipas fear that a potential ban on hydraulic fracturing (fracking) used in unconventional oil and natural gas drilling could doom their economically depressed region to a future of more poverty and crime.

Nearly 78 million acres are on offer for oil and natural gas development offshore Texas, Louisiana, Mississippi, Alabama and Florida in a federal auction to be held in August, the Department of Interior said Friday.

Natural gas continued to gain in PJM Interconnection’s annual capacity auction held this month.

In what will be the largest auction of its type, Mexico’s state-owned oil company Petroleos Mexicanos (Pemex) is to offer seven farm-out license contracts in southeastern Mexico, the industry regulator, the National Hydrocarbons Commission (CNH) agreed Thursday.

What are almost certainly to be the last two upstream auctions of the current Mexican administration, which ends Dec. 1, will face a special challenge to potential investors.