Central

Southwestern Ontario’s natural gas distribution company, Union Gas Ltd., confirmed Friday that further expansion is planned on the northbound pipeline network into central Canada from the United States.

The North American Energy Standards Board (NAESB) has ratified and will file with FERC a revised timeline for natural gas nomination cycles. And at the same time a splinter group of southwestern utilities has put together an alternative proposal, according to a Commission update issued Thursday on gas-electric coordination.

More than 40 producers offered 383 bids with high bids totaling $850.8 million to secure leaseholds in the Central and Western Gulf of Mexico (GOM), mostly for deepwater prospects, the Bureau of Ocean Energy Management said Wednesday. However, there were no bids in the Eastern GOM auction, the first in eight years.

Natural gas production from the Marcellus and Utica shales should double over the next five years, surpassing Rockies output levels from 2012 and accounting for “over a quarter of U.S. Lower 48 gas production,” Wood Mackenzie upstream analysts are forecasting.

Consol Energy has drilled its first Upper Devonian Shale well, in Greene County, PA, with results that bode well for the 300,000 acres it controls with commercial Upper Devonian potential.

Thanks to abundant shale gas supplies and appliance efficiency gains, a homeowner in Connecticut could save $1,800 per year by switching to natural gas heating from fuel oil, according to a trio of utilities in the state that have launched a campaign to get consumers to switch to gas.

To give the growing Permian Basin its full focus, Laredo Petroleum Holdings Inc. has agreed to sell all of its Granite Wash properties in the Anadarko Basin to affiliates of EnerVest Ltd. for $438 million in cash.

Cabot Oil & Gas Corp., whose central operations are in the Marcellus Shale, said Monday it plans to use natural gas to power hydraulic fracturing (fracking) equipment in northeastern Pennsylvania.

Major environmental groups leading opposition to the northern portion of the proposed $7 billion, 1,700-mile Keystone XL oil pipeline project from Alberta to refineries in the Gulf of Mexico region lashed out at the U.S. State Department last Friday for not making public the comments being collected on the project’s draft supplemental environmental impact statement (see Shale Daily, March 4). Effectively, the only way to hear and respond to public comments on the draft study will be at a hearing scheduled for April 18 in Grand Island, NB, said a Friends of the Earth spokesperson, calling the move “unusual.” This is prompting the foes of Keystone XL to claim the State Department is violating public transparency practices followed by other federal agencies regarding draft environmental studies. The stakeholders are in the middle of a 45-day comment period on the proposed northern portion of TransCanada Corp.’s controversial tar sands oil pipeline from Western Canada to Cushing, OK.