Campaign

One day after Shell Oil Co. launched a public relations campaign to showcase its onshore natural gas drilling efforts, ExxonMobil Corp. on Thursday unveiled a website to “give context to the growth of natural gas resources in the United States.”

The Canadian Yukon province has joined an industry campaign to keep drilling open in the Beaufort Sea by convincing the National Energy Board (NEB) there will be no arctic repeat of last year’s Gulf of Mexico Macondo blowout.

The Canadian Yukon province has joined an industry campaign to keep drilling open in the Beaufort Sea by convincing the National Energy Board (NEB) there will be no arctic repeat of last year’s Gulf of Mexico Macondo blowout.

On the eve of the first meeting of his recently formed Marcellus Shale Advisory Commission, Pennsylvania Gov. Tom Corbett remains firmly opposed to a state-imposed severance tax on the natural gas industry, but is open to the idea of local impact fees. And those fees can’t be considered until the local impact of drilling is quantified, a Corbett spokesman told NGI Thursday.

Sen. Lisa Murkowski (R-AK), who waged a successful campaign last fall to serve another term in the Senate, has been confirmed as the ranking member of the Senate Energy and Resources Committee by the panel’s Republican members. The selection was ratified by the full Senate Republican Caucus at a luncheon Tuesday.

Last Thursday — the 59th day of the continuing Macondo well disaster in the Gulf of Mexico — BP plc CEO Tony Hayward took a tongue lashing from House lawmakers during a subcommittee hearing that shed little if any light on what caused the nation’s worst environmental catastrophe. Not long after, BP was blasted by well partner Anadarko Petroleum Corp.

FERC’s initiation of Section 5 investigations of three interstate natural gas pipelines last month was not the start of a campaign to punish “over-earning” pipelines, an energy analyst and a pipeline official said Wednesday (see Daily GPI, Nov. 20).

NorthernStar Natural Gas Friday delivered nearly 800 supporter postcards to Oregon Gov. Ted Kulongoski as part of a two-month campaign to rally labor organizations, families and small businesses in support of its plans to build a liquefied natural gas (LNG) receiving terminal at Bradwood Landing on the Oregon side of the Columbia River just east of where it meets the Pacific Ocean. A total of 1,460 cards have been collected during the past two months, the company said.

The energy industry’s race to keep up with the global demand for natural gas is “as tight a race as the U.S. presidential campaign,” but it’s not a “zero-sum game with only one winner. This is a race all of us must win,” a Royal Dutch Shell plc executive said last week.