Draft

With the closure of a major natural gas storage field, Southern California faces potential gas curtailments leading to perhaps as many as 14 days of rolling power outages this summer, a draft report from state energy officials said Tuesday.

For the second time in less than six weeks, the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency’s (EPA) Science Advisory Board (SAB) has released a draft report that tweaks its landmark assessment last year that hydraulic fracturing (fracking) poses no “widespread, systemic impacts” to drinking water.

The California Air Resources Board (CARB) has released proposed regulations covering methane emissions and efforts to mitigate them, particularly in light of the three-month-old natural gas storage well leak in Southern California (see Daily GPI,Jan. 29).

California oil/natural gas regulators on Thursday issued yet another set of draft well stimulation rules, including for hydraulic fracturing (fracking), making further refinements based on nearly 200,000 comments that have been accumulated in the past 10 months. One change has raised the proposed threshold level for seismic activity tied to well stimulation to 2.7 from a previously proposed level of 2.0.

Natural gas wells in and around Pavillion, WY, where gas-water contamination allegations have swirled for a number of years, were properly permitted and constructed, according to a draft report released by the Wyoming Oil and Gas Conservation Commission (WOGCC).

Mum is apparently the word on hydraulic fracturing (fracking) in New York State.

Transco filed the application in January to provide an additional 647,000 Dth/d of natural gas to New York City and the Rockaways portion of Queens.

While Gov. Jerry Brown already has declared he will seek to fine-tune its provisions next year, California’s new law (SB 4) regulating hydraulic fracturing (fracking) will not have final rules implemented for the industry to follow until 2015, although the law will be effective on Jan. 1 (seeShale Daily,Sept. 24).

FERC on Thursday issued a draft notice of proposed rulemaking (NOPR) that would allow interstate natural gas pipelines and electric transmission operators to share nonpublic operational information that they believe would promote reliable service and better planning on their systems. The proposal is the first concrete step that the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission (FERC) has taken toward coordinating the two markets.