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A veteran researcher at the National Regulatory Research Institute (NRRI) is urging state regulators and utility managers to pay more attention to “lost” natural gas, both from a safety standpoint and because of costs.

Kinder Morgan Energy Partners LP and MarkWest Utica EMG LLC (MarkWest Utica) are putting up a $2 billion y-grade natural gas liquids (NGL) processing and transportation combo project that competes with the Bluegrass Pipeline, which has been proposed by Boardwalk Pipeline Partners LP and Williams.

U.S. oil and natural gas mergers and acquisition activity (M&A) plunged in the second quarter from the first three months of 2012, with divestitures driving activity, according to PwC US.

Spectra Energy Inc. recently struck contracts to underpin three major pipeline projects, moving $3 billion worth of investment opportunities into the execution column, a third brand-new pipeline to serve the Florida market among them.

Given the projected demand in the heavy-duty, long-haul trucking sector, U.S. capacity for producing liquefied natural gas (LNG) for transportation will need to accelerate rapidly to build up to 90 new small-scale LNG production facilities with a collective capital investment of up to $3.6 billion, a Pace Global consultant said last week.

Demand between now and 2015 will prop up natural gas prices, even with a backlog of drilled wells awaiting connection, and from 2016 to 2018 a “dramatic structural increase” in demand could outpace supply additions and send gas prices to as high as $6.00/MMBtu, BNP Paribas’ Teri Viswanath, director of commodity strategy, said last Friday.

The Texas Petro Index (TPI), an indicator of upstream oil and gas activity in Texas, increased modestly but steadily during the first half of the year, beginning July a scant 1.2% from matching the peak index achieved nearly five years ago, according to data released last week.

Five of the top oil and natural gas producers in the world last week failed to impress with their 2Q2013 earnings reports, with Royal Dutch Shell plc causing the most talk after it wrote off more than $2 billion on the value of some liquids-rich properties in North America.

ew pipeline and compressor infrastructure has helped boost dry gas production in West Virginia and neighboring southern Pennsylvania counties since early 2012 — in the heart of the Marcellus Shale — with more growth still expected to come in the region despite strategic shifts by oil and gas companies to more liquids-rich targets, the U.S. Energy Information Administration (EIA) said.