methane

Royal Dutch Shell plc wants to tiptoe back into Alaska’s frigid waters as soon as next summer after taking a pause following a series of blunders and miscalculations.

A California regulatory judge has recommended that Pacific Gas and Electric Co. (PG&E) be fined $6.75 million for allegedly misstating facts to the California Public Utilities Commission (CPUC) regarding an incorrectly classified natural gas transmission lateral on the peninsula south of San Francisco.

The U.S. Coast Guard (USCG) has proposed a policy that would enable it to give conditional approval for barges to transport wastewater from hydraulic fracturing (fracking) in bulk, a move that could potentially open the nation’s waterways as transit options.

Like the lumbering giants they resemble, oil majors take a bit more time to pivot from one target to the next, a task exceedingly difficult for North America’s top natural gas producer, ExxonMobil Corp. The pirouette to more oily targets came full circle in the third quarter in the three most strategic U.S. leaseholds, the Permian Basin and the Woodford and Bakken shales.

Northeastern natural gas markets have gotten a “strong signal” from the gas-on-gas competition in the Appalachian Basin this year, and there is now support for continued infrastructure development to take away more supplies, Williams CEO Alan Armstrong said Thursday.

Using unusually harsh language, the California Senate Subcommittee on Gas and Electric Infrastructure Safety in a staff-generated report strongly criticized the California Public Utilities Commission (CPUC) for allegedly dropping the ball on safety oversight of the state’s major energy utilities.

The Commodity Futures Trading Commission (CFTC) has voted to withdraw its appeal of a federal court decision that tossed the agency’s controversial final rule aimed at limiting speculative trading in the swaps markets, clearing the way for a new draft.

Range Resources Corp. doesn’t really know how many wells it may drill from its million acre-plus holdings in the Appalachian Basin. Simple answer, “it’s a lot of wells” that will grow in number for at least 10 or 20 years, COO Ray Walker told analysts Wednesday.

Sustained by low-cost shale gas resources, the North American natural gas industry has embarked on a period of sustained growth, but it will have to address the challenges of a rapidly evolving U.S. energy market for the economy to fully realize its benefits, according to a report issued Wednesday by Black & Veatch.