Delivered

Crude oil from the Bakken Shale will be Delaware-bound under an agreement between leading Bakken producer Continental Resources Inc. and PBF Energy Inc. Crude is to be delivered by rail to PBF’s double-loop track at its refinery in Delaware City.

Williams Partners Transco Pipeline delivered a system-record volume of natural gas on Jan. 22 of 10.4 million Dth as gas demand and prices in Eastern Seaboard markets spiked amid bitterly cold temperatures.

Making good on its plan to continue a “strategic redirection” of its business, NuStar Energy LP on Monday said it has agreed sell its San Antonio refinery and related assets, including a terminal in Elmendorf, TX, and a pipeline connecting the terminal and refinery, to Calumet Specialty Products Partners, LP for $100 million, plus closing date inventory estimated to be $15 million.

Taking two opportunities to field questions on hydraulic fracturing (fracking) in as many days, New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo said he supports “home rule” legislation and believes such powers would be an appropriate method for communities that support drilling to have it.

Chesapeake Energy Corp.’s largest investor on Monday delivered a stinging letter criticizing the board of directors and management team, and urged an outright sale of the company.

A coalition of organizations on Thursday delivered a letter to the New York Department of Environmental Conservation Commission (DECC), calling on the agency to undertake an environmental review of “any” applications for shale gas exploration using liquefied petroleum gas (LPG) in hydraulic fracturing (fracking) stimulation processes — the precise process to be used to develop an unconventional leasehold in Tioga County.

Enterprise Products Partners LP, Anadarko Petroleum Corp. and DCP Midstream LLC plan to construct a natural gas liquids (NGL) pipeline from the Denver-Julesburg (DJ) Basin in Weld County, CO, to Skellytown, TX, in Carson County. Initial capacity of the Front Range Pipeline is expected to be 150,000 b/d.

While gasoline prices are headed towards a perilously high level, Obama administration officials Monday delivered to President Obama a report that was relatively rosy about the progress the country has made in the past year on the energy front.

The Interior Department’s first assessment of the shale potential of Alaska’s North Slope found the potential for up to 2 billion bbl of undiscovered, technically recoverable oil and 80 Tcf of undiscovered, technically recoverable gas, according to the U.S. Geological Survey (USGS). “We looked under the entire North Slope of Alaska,” said USGS Director Marcia McNutt, who called it a landmark study. The results will enable industry to make “good seismic decisions,” will guide their investments, said Anne Castle, assistant secretary of water and science. Alaska’s shale resources “hold great promise,” but production has never been attempted due to the infrastructure challenges, Castle noted. Three source rocks of the Alaska North Slope were assessed in the study: the Triassic Shublik Formation, the lower part of the Jurassic-Lower Cretaceous Kingak Shale, and the Cretaceous pebble shale unit-Hue Shale, according to USGS. It said those shale formations are known to have generated oil and gas that migrated into conventional accumulations, including the Prudhoe Bay field. But the shales also likely retain oil and gas that did not migrate. If the shale gas should be developed, it’s remains an open questions as to whether it could make its way to the United States, which lacks pipelines and/or a West Coast liquefied natural gas (LNG) import terminal for the gas to be delivered. The nation’s sole export terminal, located in Kenai, AK, exports LNG to Asian markets.