Fraction

Crude oil production from the Eagle Ford Shale of South Texas was up by 74% in February compared with a year ago, reaching an all-time high of 471,258 b/d from the nine fields that comprise the majority of the play, according preliminary data from the Railroad Commission of Texas (RRC).

An update conducted last year of a Texas water use study found that oil and gas producers are using more water for hydraulic fracturing (fracking), but they’re also recycling more, making it important to distinguish between water “use” and “consumption.”

Is the next U.S. energy boom following shale going to evolve around oilsands? A Canadian producer is testing the viability of the unconventional oil based on its work to date in Utah.

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.

A report by an economics professor at Ohio State University says shale gas development in eastern Ohio will generate jobs, but only a fraction of the total projected by the industry.

The cost of being regulated by the Nevada Public Utilities Commission (PUC) went down Wednesday — by a fraction of a penny (1/200th of a cent to be exact). The three-member PUC voted unanimously to lower its assessment against all of the private-sector utilities it regulates to 1.90 mills from 1.95 mills.

Powered by auxiliary generators and manned by just a fraction of the traders and staff that usually support the world’s largest energy market, natural gas trading at the New York Mercantile Exchange experienced a 30-minute delayed opening Friday due to the massive electricity blackout. But despite the paucity of traders, the outage, and the storm in the Gulf of Mexico (see related story), trading proceeded in a surprising orderly manner in the abbreviated session that concluded at 12:30 p.m. EDT. The September contract finished at $4.848, down 4.3 cents for the session.

All of the climate trends pointed to this past winter as being especially cold, and the warm weather completely “baffled” one of the leading meteorologists in the country. However, the warm outcome only pointed to how difficult long-term seasonal forecasting is and how much is still being learned in making predictions, said Jon Davis, the chief meteorologist for Salomon Smith Barney on Wednesday at the GasMart/Power 2002 conference in Reno.

Only a fraction of the names listed on a citizen group’s petition citing concerns with the proposed Guardian Pipeline LLC and associated Wisconsin Gas lateral are landowners that would be affected by the construction of the projects, the companies said.