Growing

The Permian Basin in West Texas is the main engine driving Occidental Petroleum Corp. (Oxy) to record oil/gas production levels as its overseas operations continue to struggle in the Middle East/North Africa and Colombia, CEO Stephen Chazen said Thursday.

Bogged down for more than two years at FERC on a liquefied natural gas (LNG) import application, the backers of Oregon LNG have decided to join the growing list of proposed North American LNG export projects and turn their site at the mouth of the Columbia River into a bidirectional facility that concentrates of exporting western Canadian gas supplies to lucrative Asian market. They hope to have all their major federal filings made within weeks, Project Manager Peter Hansen told NGI on Tuesday.

The outlook for takeaway capacity from the Marcellus Shale continued to brighten this week, with FERC approving three pipeline expansion projects — two requested by National Fuel Gas Supply Corp. and another by Texas Eastern Transmission — designed to feed Marcellus gas to Northeast markets.

Based on the state’s latest statistics as of the end of February, North Dakota’s oil production has doubled in the past two years, and with the help of increased rail transportation it is being marketed nationwide.

The U.S. Interior Department’s Bureau of Land Management (BLM) has outlined an initiative for wrestling with the growing mix of economic, political and environmental issues cropping up on public lands. BLM’s “Landscape Approach for Managing the Public Lands” initiative is to examine ecological conditions, patterns and management opportunities that may not be evident when managing smaller land areas, a BLM spokesperson said. This approach is designed to help the federal agency better manage the increasing demand for the use of public lands for recreation and energy development. BLM said its “landscape” approach will be a national program built on, connected to and supported by efforts in its field offices. The program was put together by a 12-member team consisting of managers from the Washington, DC, office, National Operations Center and state field offices in Alaska, Montana, Nevada, New Mexico and Utah. The program will focus on two components: rapid ecoregional assessments and ecoregional direction.

Sempra Energy plans to ride the growing U.S. bandwagon for exporting plentiful domestic supplies of liquefied natural gas (LNG) through a $7 billion joint venture (JV) and midstream master limited partnership (MLP) centered on its under-used Cameron LNG receiving facility in Louisiana, said CEO Debra Reed, who spoke to analysts Thursday in San Diego.

Following in the footsteps of its affiliates, Gulf Crossing Pipeline Co. LLC Wednesday proposed adding an enhanced service to its tariff to serve the growing natural gas demand of power generators, industrial customers and local distribution companies (LDC).

Cheap natural gas, courtesy of shale plays, is bringing industry back to the United States, growing economies along the Gulf Coast, in the Northeast and elsewhere. But it has also made holding gas transportation capacity a more dicey prospect for end-users, and there is a risk that some of the energy industry’s risk management muscle could atrophy while on a diet of low prices and low volatility.

The clock is ticking for the United States to begin exporting liquefied natural gas (LNG) before competitors corner the growing global market, according to Donald Raikes, vice president of Dominion Transmission Inc., one of the companies seeking permission to export shale gas.