Expects

ConocoPhillips expects to complete the spinoff its refining arm by the middle of next year, which would absorb the natural gas and oil pipelines as well as joint venture projects, CEO Jim Mulva said Wednesday.

Royal Dutch Shell said it expects to decide by the end of the year where it will build a “world-scale” ethylene cracker in the Marcellus Shale region, and it said the three states where it is considering construction of the facility are Ohio, Pennsylvania and West Virginia.

DCP Midstream Partners LP will construct a 200 MMcf/d natural gas processing plant in the Eagle Ford. The $120 million Eagle Plant project will be supported by a 15-year fee based agreement to process the company’s natural gas volumes. The facility, which will compliment the company’s five existing processing plants and capacity of 800 MMcf/d in South Texas, is expected to be completed during 4Q2012.

Riding the continuing wave of high oil prices, Occidental Petroleum Corp. (Oxy) expects its shale well count to keep growing, drilling 150-175 wells this year in California, said CEO Stephen Chazen during an earnings conference call with financial analysts Tuesday.

Cheniere Energy said Tuesday it expects to begin construction of long-discussed natural gas liquefaction and export facilities at its existing Sabine Pass import terminal in Cameron Parish, LA, early next year. The company said it will spend $6 billion to expand the facility to allow the liquefaction and export of domestic natural gas, particularly that from shale plays.

Affiliate of Peoples Natural Gas Co. LLC seeks to have storage facility operating by start of winter heating season.

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.

Encana Corp., Canada’s No. 1 natural gas producer, on Tuesday said it has ended talks with a subsidiary of PetroChina International Ltd. to jointly develop a gassy Cutbank Ridge leasehold, which straddles the borders of northeast British Columbia (BC) and northwest Alberta.

Participants in the Canadian energy industry are signaling that its switch of drilling targets to oil and natural gas liquids (NGL) will continue and accelerate.