Hold

Turtle Bayou Gas Storage Co. said it will hold a nonbinding open season Oct. 3 through Oct. 14 for capacity in its 12 Bcf salt dome storage facility proposed for Southeast Texas.

California’s Santa Barbara County Board of Supervisors decided Tuesday night to hold off on a ban of hydraulic fracturing (fracking) and instead add well permitting requirements to require individual approvals by the county’s planning and development department.

Rex Energy Corp. said results from its first test well into the Upper Devonian/Burkett Shale just north of Pittsburgh are encouraging enough to justify additional wells into the formation directly above the Marcellus Shale in the coming year.

The Delaware River Basin Commission (DRBC) plans to hold a special meeting on Oct. 21 to act on draft natural gas drilling regulations, according to Executive Director Carol R. Collier. The proposed regulations would protect water resources of the Delaware River Basin when gas projects are developed and in operation. The DRBC received close to 69,000 comments on the draft rules, which originally were published in December (see Shale Daily, Dec. 10, 2010). The meeting, open to the public, is to be held from 1-3 p.m. in the Patriots Theater at the War Memorial, 1 Memorial Drive, Trenton, NJ. A public hearing at the meeting is not planned.

An estimate of undiscovered, technically recoverable natural gas and natural gas liquids (NGL) contained in the Marcellus Shale issued this week by the U.S. Geological Survey (USGS) will be included in the next Energy Information Administration’s (EIA) Annual Energy Outlook (AEO), according to EIA.

Florida Gas Transmission did not extend an Overage Alert Day beyond Friday.

Norse Energy Corp. ASA, which early in the year had sent notices of force majeure in response to New York’s ban on permitting for drilling operations involving hydraulic fracturing (fracking), has reallocated resources to focus on Marcellus and Utica shale development in anticipation of new rules allowing the use of fracking in the state, the company said Tuesday.

Citing low linepack on upstream pipeline Kern River, Southwest Gas issued a Hold Burn to Scheduled Quantities notice Wednesday. Southwest asked shippers to limit actual takes to no more than their scheduled nominations.

In a landmark maneuver Thursday the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) released a list of proposed standards to reduce air pollution from oil and natural gas drilling operations, with particular attention paid to shale development operations, which include hydraulic fracturing (hydrofracking).