Levels

Running counter to national trends, ozone pollution levels in seven counties in Wyoming have worsened this year, according to the annual “State of the Air 2016” report from the American Lung Association (ALA), which was released on Wednesday.

Gas demand for power generation is expected to rise this spring and summer throughout the West because of lower-than-normal water levels. Earlier in March, California state officials placed snowpack levels at 20% of normal, and the state’s three-year drought has been extended to four years.

July natural gas is expected to open a penny higher Monday morning at $4.75 as overnight prices reach $4.88 and near-term weather forecasts turn warmer. Overnight oil markets were mixed.

Pennsylvania regulators and officials from Range Resources Corp. are trying to determine what, if anything, caused a large water impoundment in the southeast part of the state to leak enough brine water that high levels of chloride were detected in the soil beneath it.

February natural gas is expected to open 17 cents higher Friday morning at $4.90 as traders go back to the drawing board and refigure season-ending inventories now expected to be significantly lower than earlier estimates. Overnight oil markets weakened.

Oil production in Texas continued climbing during May, while natural gas output trended down as it has for much of this year.

University of Adelaide researchers in Australia are developing a new type of laser system that will monitor methane levels across large areas in order to monitor emissions of the greenhouse gas. The system has the potential to detect methane leaks from long-distance underground gas pipelines and gas fields, including coal seam gas extraction operations, and to measure methane emissions from animal production, the university said. “We hope to accurately measure methane concentrations up to a distance of 5 kilometers,” said project leader David Ottaway, senior lecturer in the university’s School of Chemistry and Physics. “This will give us an ability to map methane over an area as large as 25 square kilometers in a very short time. At the moment current technology only allows detection at a single point source as it blows past the detector.”

Concentrations of methane, ethane and propane were found in higher levels in drinking water for homes within a kilometer of shale gas wells in parts of the Marcellus Shale in northeast Pennsylvania, according to a study released Monday. It was the third such study by Duke University’s Robert Jackson, a professor of environmental sciences.

With 35 states having created various levels of incentives for using natural gas in transportation and the Energy Information Administration (EIA) predicting gas use in transportation will grow 100% by 2017, the latest Barclays analysis of U.S. gas broke down some of the metrics and concluded that natural gas vehicles (NGV) on the road will have to swell 12-fold between 2011 and 2017 to meet the EIA prediction.