High

Environmental questions and high costs for water have created a big headache for unconventional oil and gas producers, but it won’t take long before those problems are turned into opportunities for other businesses, according to industry executives.

Environmental questions and high costs for water have created a big headache for unconventional oil and gas producers, but it won’t take long before those problems are turned into opportunities for other businesses, according to industry executives.

Generally rising crude oil prices pumped up the drilling rig count (53) in California to a 22-year high in July, and a lot of the action is in “urban plays,” previously dormant or downplayed fields from the state’s rich history of oil and natural gas production that are suddenly stirring new drilling.

With energy demand high and producers climbing over each other in the Marcellus Shale region, the Northeast remains “ripe with bottlenecks,” and it’s likely to get more congested before natural gas infrastructure is completed, Williams CEO Alan Armstrong said last week.

Corridor Resources Inc. and partner Petrolia Inc. are conducting a three-part exploration program on Anticosti Island in the Gulf of Saint Lawrence to advance the “exploration and development potential of the vast shale oil prospect” on the 3,050 square-mile island, Corridor said.

With energy demand high and producers climbing over each other in the Marcellus Shale region, the Northeast remains “ripe with bottlenecks,” and it’s likely to get more congested before natural gas infrastructure is completed, Williams CEO Alan Armstrong said Wednesday.

With the backdrop of high and growing reliance on natural gas for power generation driven by the continuing shale gas expansion and resulting low prices, a conference room filled with gas industry representatives Tuesday discussed ways to better coordinate regional and national gas and power grids during a daylong FERC conference in Portland, OR.

With heavy ramifications for Midcontinent energy infrastructure and eventual exports, the United States will find itself with oversupplies of both domestically produced liquids and crude oil from now through 2017, market consultant/analyst Rusty Braziel of RBN Energy LLC told a session of the Colorado Oil and Gas Association (COGA) annual meeting in Denver earlier this month (Aug. 13-16).

Two municipalities in upstate New York have decided to remain neutral on the issue of high-volume hydraulic fracturing (HVHF) and will wait until the state Department of Environmental Conservation (DEC) issues its report on the practice.