Dropped

October natural gas trudged lower Friday as traders see widening differentials auguring further weakness. October fell 6.9 cents to $3.809 and November dropped 5.9 cents to $3.922. October crude oil shed $1.44 to $87.96/bbl.

Bayer AG continues to discuss the lease or sale of acreage it owns in West Virginia for potential locations for ethane crackers, but at least one company has dropped out of those talks. “An affiliate of ours had been looking at a project in that area for an ethylene facility, but they are no longer doing that,” a spokesman for Houston-based PetroLogistics told NGI’s Shale Daily. In December, Bayer said a trio of sites it owns in industrial parks in New Martinsville, Institute and South Charleston, WV, totaling about 1,480 acres were available and would be ideal locations for thermal crackers (see Shale Daily, Dec. 23, 2010). Bayer wouldn’t discuss “speculation or market rumors” about possible deals, but has been in “serious discussions with several interested companies” that are looking at the West Virginia properties, Bayer spokesman Bryan Iams told NGI’s Shale Daily.

It’s a long way from New York City to Shreveport, LA, in more ways than one, but that distance was bridged recently when a Gotham-based news website gave props to the capital of the Ark-La-Tex for its hospitality to recent college graduates. In other words, there are jobs down there, the Yankees heard. And that’s thanks mainly to the Haynesville Shale.

The value of fugitive natural gas and condensate air emissions in the Barnett Shale of North Texas is about $52 million a year, according to research paid for by a clean air group, which asserts that “simple air pollution control devices” would capture this lost revenue if they were installed in the nine-county nonattainment area around Dallas-Fort Worth (DFW).

The Canadian subsidiary of Apache Corp. has dropped out of a joint venture (JV) with Corridor Resources because it said poor results from two natural gas test wells in New Brunswick’s emerging Frederick Brook Shale did not justify spending more.

Continuing the downward momentum from the previous week (see Shale Daily, April 11), the number of rigs drilling for oil and gas in U.S. unconventional plays dropped by another 1% for the week ending April 15, according to NGI’s Shale Daily Unconventional Rig Count.

The Ohio General Assembly is considering a bill that would open leasing rights for all property owned by the state government — including state parks — to oil and gas companies.

The Colorado Oil & Gas Association (COGA) has dropped a two-year-old lawsuit against state regulators that had challenged more stringent drilling rules.

Pennsylvania is growing more slowly than the rest of the nation, but the expansion of Marcellus Shale natural gas operations will provide significant opportunities to the state in coming years, according to a report issued by the Pennsylvania Department of Community and Economic Development (DCED).