Else

In the current commodity price environment, the best thing about a natural gas rig might be that it can stop drilling for gas, move somewhere else and start drilling for oil. Put another way in a recent note by analysts at Goldman Sachs: “Where a rig is drilling is a more reliable indicator than its classification as a natural gas or oil rig in predicting if the well drilled will be a natural gas well or an oil well.”

In the current commodity price environment, the best thing about a natural gas rig might be that it can stop drilling for gas, move somewhere else and start drilling for oil.

Wyoming has set aside $750,000 to help fund cistern systems for Pavillion homeowners whose groundwater may have been contaminated by natural gas drilling, and affected residents will be able to take advantage of that offer, Gov. Matt Mead told reporters last Wednesday.

In about 18 months the U.S. Geological Survey (USGS) should be able to tell the energy industry, and everyone else, just how productive the Three Forks formation, which lies below the Bakken Shale, might be.

It’s no secret that weak prices have made natural gas a stepchild to oil and natural gas liquids (NGL), but perhaps nowhere else is the clean-burning stuff more out of favor than in the halls of Houston-based EOG Resources Inc., where CEO Mark Papa can’t seem to distance himself from the Mcfs fast enough.

It’s no secret that weak prices have made natural gas a stepchild to oil and natural gas liquids (NGL), but perhaps nowhere else is the clean-burning stuff more out of favor than in the halls of Houston-based EOG Resources Inc., where CEO Mark Papa can’t seem to distance himself from the Mcfs fast enough.

The day before the Pittsburgh City Council voted to prohibit natural gas drilling there (see Shale Daily, Nov. 17), commissioners in South Fayette Township, on Pittsburgh’s southwestern edge, voted to ban drilling in conservation areas and all residential zones, including suburban communities and rural farmland.

ExxonMobil Corp. has no plans to change its approach to deepwater natural gas and oil drilling in the Gulf of Mexico (GOM) or anywhere else, despite the ongoing offshore tragedy, Chairman Rex Tillerson told shareholders Wednesday in Dallas.

For producers — and anyone else who prefers that gas prices are higher rather than lower — the good times won’t arrive until 2013. But then prices could shoot up as high as $10/MMBtu on demand strength coupled with constraints in the rig and oilfield services sector, while global markets draw liquefied natural gas (LNG) away from U.S. shores, according to analysts at Wood Mackenzie.