Ending

NGI’s Unconventional Rig Count edged up ever so slightly for the week ending July 22, rising to 987 rigs from 984 the previous week. Despite the pedestrian weekly advance, the current unconventional rig count remains a full 3% higher than the 961 rigs that were at work one month ago.

August natural gas scored a double-digit gain Friday as traders noted what seems to be a never-ending series of forecasts calling for above-normal temperatures. At the close August was up 16.8 cents to $4.546 and September had added 16.2 cents to $4.520. August crude oil made an advance of its own adding $1.55 to $97.24/bbl.

The City Council of Auburn, NY, voted Thursday to stop accepting wastewater generated from hydraulic fracturing (fracking) at natural gas wells, ending more than a decade of the practice and eliminating a major source of revenue for the city.

The EXCO Resources Inc. board of directors is ending its bid to sell the company.

Southern California Gas is ending Thursday a high-linepack OFO that had been in effect for the previous two days. The LDC expects July 5-19 anomaly repairs on a segment of Line 2000 and a one-day Wheeler Ridge Station outage July 6 for repair of a cracked weld on the emergency shutdown discharge header to result in capacity losses of 200 MMcf/d at El Paso-Ehrenberg and 450 MMcf/d at Wheeler North, respectively.

Alliance Pipeline LP said Hess Corp. has contracted for capacity on a North Dakota pipeline lateral and associated facilities it plans to construct to carry liquids-rich gas from the Williston Basin.

Four environmental groups filed a lawsuit against the Interior Department’s Bureau of Land Management (BLM) in federal court on Monday, alleging the agency illegally approved dozens of oil and gas projects in the Piceance Basin in western Colorado without analyzing the impacts on air quality.

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.

Despite ending April at 1.8 Tcf — about an 11% decline compared with April 2010 — working gas inventories will build strongly this summer and should approach record-high levels in the second half of the year, the Energy Information Administration (EIA) said in its Short-Term Energy Outlook for May.