Management

The Interior Department’s Bureau of Land Management (BLM) said a proposed rule that would, among other things, increase public involvement in the way it formulates Resource Management Plans (RMP), would not directly affect the decisions it makes but conceded that it could impact the oil and gas industry.

Efforts that began last year to lease state-owned land on the Ohio River and elsewhere in West Virginia have practically stalled with the sharp decline in oil and natural gas prices, compounding the downturn’s impact on state revenues as severance tax collections have fallen this year, too.

Private equity (PE) money is continuing to flow into prospective Lower 48 operations, with two deals announced over the past few days that together are worth more than $1 billion.

Amid a continuing dark cloud of legal and regulatory accusations of wrongdoing in its natural gas operations, San Francisco-based Pacific Gas and Electric Co. (PG&E) on Tuesday celebrated what it touted as an unprecedented amount of technical recognition for a U.S. natural gas utility.

Operators may argue that unconventional drilling using hydraulic fracturing (fracking) doesn't require a lot of the overall water used in the United States. But to paraphrase former Speaker of the House Tip O'Neill: all water is local.

Encana Corp., in the midst of a strategic review of its North American onshore business, on Tuesday announced an organizational restructuring following the retirement of formerly key executives.

As part of a broader set of management succession plan changes,Sempra Energyannounced selection of new CEOs to run its two California utility andU.S. Gas & Powerunits. Under the changes, current CEO of the gas/power subsidiary,Jeffrey Martin, 51, will become CEO ofSan Diego Gas and Electric Co.; current COODennis Arriola, 52, becomes CEO atSouthern California Gas Co.; andPatricia Wagner, 51, Sempra’s current vice president for parent company audit services, becomes CEO of U.S. Gas & Power.

Shares of Kinder Morgan Inc. (KMI) closed up more than 4% Wednesday following a pre-market conference call during which CEO Rich Kinder went through a point-by-point explanation of how the company and its Kinder Morgan Energy Partners (KMP) account for spending to maintain pipelines and other assets.

California’s Occidental Petroleum Corp. (Oxy) is eyeing 7 billion bbl of reserves from the Monterey Shale and other projects in the state, the management team said Tuesday.