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Archie W. Dunham, 73, the former chairman of ConocoPhillips, was tapped Thursday as Chesapeake Energy Corp.’s independent nonexecutive chairman. Dunham, who also was CEO of predecessor Conoco Inc., has had “no previous relationship” with the company, the board said.

Monster U.S. oil supply growth will force domestic producers to curtail onshore activity in the upcoming weeks but it won’t be soon enough for 2013 oil prices, which likely will be “uglier than expected,” Raymond James & Associates Inc. analysts said Monday.

Summer power supplies along the entire West Coast are looking more than adequate with forecasts calling for increased amounts hydroelectric power and low-priced natural gas in the Pacific Northwest, and the reports that the three-month outage at the San Onofre Nuclear Generating Station (Songs) in Southern California now is scheduled to end next month.

Climate change impacts are lessened when power plants burn natural gas instead of coal, but the same is not necessarily true when vehicles burn natural gas instead of traditional fuels because methane leakage more than offsets the clean-burning benefits of gas, according to a methane leakage model developed by the Environmental Defense Fund (EDF) and university researchers. However, the gas industry countered that the model relies on “outdated and incomplete” data.

One day after Magnum Hunter Resources Corp. agreed to sell $100 million of convertible preferred units in subsidiary Eureka Hunter Holdings LLC to an affiliate of ArcLight Capital Partners LLC, the producer announced Thursday that $58.5 million of the proceeds would be used by Eureka Hunter to acquire natural gas treating company TransTex Gas Services LP, a privately held company based in Houston.

Independent power giant NRG Energy Inc. CEO David Crane predicted Wednesday that the entire energy sector would be impacted by continuing low natural gas prices this year. Crane was a keynote speaker at the Jefferies 2012 Global Clean Technology Conference in New York City.

Chesapeake Energy Corp. is contemplating the sale of its entire Permian Basin portfolio, which represented about 5% of 2011 net proved reserves and current production. Together with other sales and partnerships being considered in the U.S. onshore, the producer said it could pump up its balance sheet to the tune of $10-12 billion in 2012.

NGPL advised shippers of a potential OFO “for oversupply or undertake activities across its entire system due to the lack of significant market load.” Shippers can mitigate the need for an OFO by ensuring that imbalances are not in a long position and that point operators are flowing as nominated the pipeline added. It said that if it is determined that the OFO is required, “any gas left on the pipeline is at risk of OFO penalties.” See the bulletin board for details.

An estimate of undiscovered, technically recoverable natural gas and natural gas liquids (NGL) contained in the Marcellus Shale issued this week by the U.S. Geological Survey (USGS) will be included in the next Energy Information Administration’s (EIA) Annual Energy Outlook (AEO), according to EIA.