Getting

Several groups of Ohio landowners looking to lease thousands of acres in the Utica Shale believe their prospects are getting brighter now that the U.S. presidential election is over, oil and natural gas companies are starting to make moves and promising results are emerging from a well in Athens County.

MarkWest Energy Partners is getting ready for “explosive growth” in the Northeast “in 2013 and beyond,” CEO Frank Semple said Thursday. Next year, natural gas liquids (NGL) processing in the Marcellus and Utica shales combined should increase to 4.8 Bcf/d from 2.7 Bcf/d to serve producer customers.

America’s energy security risk is bad and getting worse under current policy and regulatory framework, according to a report by the U.S. Chamber of Commerce’s Institute for 21st Century Energy.

America’s energy security risk is bad and getting worse under current policy and regulatory framework, according to a report by the U.S. Chamber of Commerce’s Institute for 21st Century Energy.

America’s energy security risk is bad and getting worse under current policy and regulatory framework, according to a report by the U.S. Chamber of Commerce’s Institute for 21st Century Energy.

The proliferation of rail-based crude oil transport in the Bakken Shale and elsewhere has not gone unnoticed by pipeliner Enbridge Inc. “It’s an agile…way of getting to market,” Enbridge’s Stephen John Wuori, president of the liquids pipeline business, said. However, “…rail movements can and will get turned off in a day if differentials collapse.”

Chesapeake Energy Corp. on Wednesday clinched multiple agreements to sell most of its prized Permian Basin properties to heavyweights Royal Dutch Shell plc and Chevron Corp. and its remaining midstream properties to Global Infrastructure Partners (GIP), which together with other asset sales would give the cash-strapped producer total net proceeds of $6.9 billion.

Anadarko Petroleum Corp.’s Jim Hackett, who traded the CEO chair for that of executive chairman in May, said the country needs to have an “informed and constructive debate” on the national energy policy to ensure natural gas and oil can continue to be developed under “very strong and appropriate” environmental protections.

After a string of modest but attention-getting spills over the past 18 months, the government in the home base of the Canadian oil and gas industry has launched a review of pipeline safety standards.