Immediate

Arkansas Attorney General Dustin McDaniel said Tuesday that his office has opened an investigation of a crude oil spill near Mayflower, AR, which ExxonMobil was working to clean up. The cause of the spill is still under investigation, but Exxon said the spill did not involve tar sands oil.

A six-foot section of a 20-inch diameter Columbia Gas Transmission system that ruptured Dec. 11 in West Virginia had wall thickness measured as low as 0.078 inches, significantly thinner than the nominal wall thickness of 0.281 inches when the pipeline was installed in 1967, according to a preliminary report issued Wednesday by the National Transportation Safety Board (NTSB).

A special community public hearing by the Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC) last Friday did nothing to clear up the immediate future of major electric generation sources in Southern California. Majority owner/operator of the San Onofre Nuclear Generating Station (Songs), Southern California Edison Co. (SCE), faced withering questioning from the NRC on its partial restart plan for Songs Unit 2.

Total volumes embedded in only the five Alberta shale deposits with “immediate potential” for development are colossal: 3,424 Tcf of natural gas, 58.6 billion bbl of gas liquids byproducts, and 423.6 billion bbl of oil, says a report by the resource appraisal group of Alberta’s Energy Resources Conservation Board (ERCB). Even the immense current estimates of the province’s total resource endowment could eventually turn out to be conservative, the board said.

Amid forecasts that see no end to low gas prices across North America, overseas exports of liquefied natural gas (LNG) are being rated as a must for development of the Canadian version of shale supplies in northern British Columbia (BC).

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.

President Obama last Tuesday jumped at the opportunity to possibly eliminate tax breaks for the oil and gas industry, urging congressional leaders “to take immediate action” after comments by House Speaker John Boehner (R-OH) seemed to indicate that he was receptive to the idea.

President Obama on Tuesday jumped at the opportunity to possibly eliminate tax breaks for the oil and gas industry, urging congressional leaders “to take immediate action” after comments by House Speaker John Boehner (R-OH) seemed to indicate that he was receptive to the idea.

Because an “all-time high level” of uncompleted natural wells in the Haynesville Shale await a tie-in to pipelines, don’t expect an immediate drop-off in incremental supply as the rig count drops, analysts with Raymond James & Associates Inc. said in a note Monday.