Hinting

Legislators and regulators in New York are hinting that should high-volume hydraulic fracturing (fracking) be permitted in the Empire State, localities that are the most receptive to the practice may be the first — and, possibly, the only — areas to allow it.

After hinting for months that going big was the only way to accommodate excess ethane supplies in the Marcellus Shale, Williams on Tuesday proposed to build a large-scale natural gas processing and ethane project that would traverse the rich gas/dry gas divide in Pennsylvania.

Gov. Kathleen Blanco is calling on the federal government to give Louisiana a greater share of the revenues from the oil and natural gas produced off the coast of her state, hinting strongly that she will block future lease sales off Louisiana’s shoreline if the government does not fork over a bigger share of the royalty pie to the state.

While hinting that his company has locked up liquefied natural gas (LNG) terminal development on the West Coast with its supposedly easily expandable Baja, Mexico facility, Sempra Energy COO Donald Felsinger told an energy financial conference Tuesday that the Gulf of Mexico most likely will be the center of new LNG receiving terminals because of its access to national markets, along with readily available processing and storage infrastructure. Felsinger spoke at the Banc of America Securities Energy & Power Conference in Las Vegas.

While hinting that his company has locked up liquefied natural gas (LNG) terminal development on the West Coast with its supposedly easily expandable Baja, Mexico facility, Sempra Energy COO Donald Felsinger told an energy financial conference Tuesday that the Gulf of Mexico most likely will be the center of new LNG receiving terminals because of its access to national markets, along with readily available processing and storage infrastructure. Felsinger spoke at the Banc of America Securities Energy & Power Conference in Las Vegas.

With fresh forecasts and other signs hinting at a potential early start of heating season, gas buyers were spurred to keep pushing their storage injection schedules and to acquire supplies for immediate burns in the northern U.S. and Canada, where chilly start-of-fall temperatures have more furnaces getting turned on as the week progresses. The result Tuesday was further price increases, nearly all of them in double digits. The upticks ranged from a little under a dime to nearly 30 cents; most of those over 20 cents occurred at Rockies/San Juan/Pacific Northwest points.