Mile

Williams Partners LP has placed into service a pair of expansions on its 10,500-mile Transcontinental Gas Pipe Line (Transco), which will add a combined 598,500 Dth/d of firm transportation capacity to serve markets in the southeastern United States, the Tulsa-based partnership said Monday.

The Arlington, TX, City Council voted 8-1 to award Chesapeake Energy Corp. for its Bobcat 1H well on a site that is about a half-mile southwest of the Cowboys Stadium. The approval followed a public hearing and an agreement by Chesapeake to coordinate heavy truck traffic around events at the stadium and the nearby Rangers Ballpark, the Fort Worth Star-Telegram reported. As many as a dozen wells could be placed on Chesapeake’s Truman site accessing the mineral resources of about 1,200 property owners. Some area residents had expressed concerns about traffic and pollution, but others at the council meeting said they supported development of their mineral rights.

An Oregon Circuit Court Tuesday ordered Clatsop County to restore its earlier approval of a 41-mile natural gas transmission pipeline project tied to the proposed Oregon LNG receiving terminal for liquefied natural gas (LNG) at the mouth of the Columbia River.

Gastar Exploration Ltd. announced Monday that it will lease about 3,300 gross acres in West Virginia from PPG Industries Inc. and plans to drill into the Marcellus Shale play as early as July.

After a delayed start pushed into mid-January (see Daily GPI, Jan. 19), TransCanada Corp. has its new 303-mile, 30-inch diameter Bison Pipeline operating at near 90% capacity bringing Rockies supplies to the Midwest via an interconnection with Northern Border Inc., a U.S.-based company executive told NGI Thursday.

North Dakota’s oil patch accounted for less than 1% of total U.S. crude oil production three years ago, but today the state is pumping close to 6% of total crude output, thanks to the formidable Bakken-Three Forks shale region, the state’s Department of Mineral Resources (DMR) is reporting.

The Chesapeake Bay, long plagued by pollution from development across its 64,000-square-mile watershed, is showing “some encouraging signs of improvement,” but is still “dangerously out of balance” and needs to be protected from a variety of threats, including natural gas drilling operations in the Marcellus Shale, according to the Chesapeake Bay Foundation’s (CBF) “2010 State of the Bay” report.

Natural gas-fired electric generation plants, which along with two major nuclear power facilities, line California’s 1,000-mile coast, are one of the big winners in the move last Thursday by state water control regulators to ease implementation of a ban on the use of sea water to cool the plants, which account for 40% of the state’s generation capacity.

Reflecting conditions of depressed demand and surplus supplies in the Pacific Northwest, Williams’ Northwest Pipeline Co. has decided to halt plans for a 172-mile extension of 36- and 30-inch diameter pipelines that was set to provide another 500 MMcf/d of capacity into the region’s Interstate 5 corridor.