Critical

ConocoPhillips will say goodbye to the ranks of Big Oil and move to the top of the North America’s pure-play explorers list at the end of this month, with a U.S. focus on liquids-rich opportunities, the incoming CEO said Monday.

Oil and natural gas operators appear to be on the wrong end of a turf war with the coal industry along the length of eastern Ohio, losing “significant” amounts of acreage in coal-bearing townships that also intersect with the state’s portions of the Marcellus and Utica shales.

Capping off a string of regulatory actions that have been favorable to the oil and natural gas industry — and somewhat embarrassing to the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) — the regulator has said it will delay the release of final air pollution standards for hydraulic fracturing (fracking) for two weeks.

President Obama’s fiscal 2013 budgets for the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), Department of Energy (DOE) and Department of Interior (DOI) propose funding directed at assessing the impact of hydraulic fracturing (fracking) of shale.

The shale rocks that are reconfiguring the North American energy landscape eventually will be unearthed around the world, albeit at a much slower pace, but the economic impacts will be gigantic, an ExxonMobil Corp. executive said Tuesday.

Southern Star Central issued a System Critical Notice noting several restrictions on storage services and balancing that will take effect Tuesday. They include no Authorized Overrun Service for firm storage injections and no interruptible injections; see the bulletin board for details. Southern Star said an OFO could be issued as early as Tuesday to any customer that fails to comply with the restrictions.

A coalition of conservancy and stakeholder groups critical of Pennsylvania’s natural gas drilling said Monday the state needs to slow the shale drilling pace to ensure that safeguards are in place to protect citizens.

Columbia Gas is deeming Thursday as a Critical Day for storage, which means no interruptible storage injections are expected to be available. Upstream affiliate Columbia Gulf said no AutoPAL (Park and Loan) services nor due-pipe imbalance resolution nominations will be allowed effective Thursday.

Columbia Gas (TCO) said system operational conditions have improved, allowing it to lift Monday a Critical Day for storage that had been in effect for the previous two days. Daily storage penalties are no longer in effect and interruptible services, including AutoPAL (Park and Loan), are now available, the pipeline said. TCO also said it took the WB-Loop from Granny’s Creek valve to Gassaway valve, located in Braxton and Clay counties, WV, out of service for five days Monday to make modifications to the pipeline. Four production meters have been shut in for the duration of the outage, affecting 3,406 Dth/d.