Basin

The Gulf of Mexico’s shallow basin is a “great place” forsmaller independents now and into the future, according to threewho should know. Executives with three of the best performingindependents say their companies will continue to focus nearly allof their attention on finding natural gas in the shallow offshoreareas of Texas and Louisiana.

The Gulf of Mexico’s shallow basin is a “great place” forsmaller independents now and into the future, according to threewho should know. Executives with three of the best performingindependents say their companies will continue to focus nearly allof their attention on finding natural gas in the shallow offshoreareas of Texas and Louisiana.

Northern Natural Gas declared a force majeure after discoveringa leak in its 20-inch Plymouth to Mitchell line in the PermianBasin area of West Texas. Teams isolated the leak, NNG saidWednesday, and the approximate downtime was expected to be twodays. Flow was scheduled to zero at the Shell Tippett, Burlington,Marathon Yates and Southern Union receipt points.

With the conspicuous exception of San Juan Basin, pricescontinued to rise by about a dime or more at most points Thursday.While still firming, the market’s increases were smaller than thoseon Wednesday.

Questar experienced a mechanical failure Thursday in Unit #7 atits Clay Basin storage facility. Barring unexpected complications,repairs should be complete by today and the unit available forservice again on Tuesday’s gas day, the pipeline said. Injectioncapacity has been reduced to 235,000 Dth/d during the outage.Allocation of injection capacity was expected to occur each day,with the impact determined by customer nominations. However, thereis no impact on withdrawal nominations, Questar said.

Ultra Petroleum commenced in-fill drilling last week in theJonah Field, located in the Green River Basin of Wyoming. It gotthe go-ahead to start drilling on June 8 when the Bureau of LandManagement released an order for 22 new well locations, whichshould keep Ultra busy through 2001.

Ultra Petroleum commenced in-fill drilling this week in theJonah Field, located in the Green River Basin of Wyoming. It gotthe go-ahead to start drilling on June 8 when the Bureau of LandManagement released an order for 22 new well locations, whichshould keep Ultra busy through 2001.

San Juan Basin and California were conspicuous Monday as theonly markets swimming against a bearish tide. All other cash pointswere falling by anywhere from a penny or two (Southwest/Rockies) to15 cents or more, with the majority of declines tending to bebetween a nickel and a dime.

As part of a continued streamlining, Kinder Morgan Inc. unloadedall of its Oklahoma, Kansas and West Texas gathering and processingbusinesses last week to ONEOK Inc. In addition, ONEOK agreed to buyKinder’s marketing and trading business as well as certain storageand transmission pipelines in the Midcontinent.