Changes

The federal government should leave shale regulation to the states, but companies should be ready for changes to the tax code that will likely impact their industry, a bipartisan panel of lawmakers told a Philadelphia audience last Wednesday.

Tens of thousands of new jobs would be created in the Empire State if regulators decide to allow shale development, the New York Department of Environmental Conservation (DEC) reported in the final draft of its report on the environmental impacts of hydraulic fracturing (fracking) on Wednesday.

Gulf South has made a couple of small changes in the scheduling of meter outages during in-line inspection pigging on Index 287 in the New Orleans area that began Tuesday and will continue through Aug. 25 (see Daily GPI, July 26). See the bulletin board for details.

Changes to the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers’ (USACE) methods of reviewing and permitting natural gas pipelines in Pennsylvania, which were instituted by the Corps July 1, will result in “substantial delays” in pipeline construction in the state’s Marcellus Shale area, according to David Spigelmyer, Chesapeake Energy vice president of government relations.

The energy security risks of the United States worsened significantly in 2010 and could remain uncomfortably high for the next 25 years without changes to “a bewildering set of energy policies and layers of complex regulations,” according to the second edition of an annual report by the U.S. Chamber of Commerce’s Institute for 21st Century Energy.

The energy security risks of the United States worsened significantly in 2010 and could remain uncomfortably high for the next 25 years without changes to “a bewildering set of energy policies and layers of complex regulations,” according to the second edition of an annual report by the U.S. Chamber of Commerce’s Institute for 21st Century Energy.

Fayetteville Shale pioneer Southwestern Energy Co. has been branching out to Appalachia’s Marcellus Shale; to New Brunswick, Canada; and to the Lower Smackover Brown Dense formation, an unconventional oil reservoir in southern Arkansas and northern Louisiana. Right now company executives are most enthusiastic about the latter, which Southwestern has been working on for more than two years.

The City of Wellsburg, WV, has taken its first step toward repealing an ordinance it had enacted less than three months ago calling for a ban on natural gas drilling within the city and an adjacent one-mile buffer zone.

Two issues — rising oil prices and regulatory changes — were selected as the biggest threats to the oil and gas industry, according to BDO USA LLP, which referenced U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) 10-K filings for the 100 largest exploration and production (E&P) companies in the U.S. for a new report on industry risks.