Minute

Reminding the public of the benefits of clean-burning natural gas derived from Pennsylvania shale development, Pennsylvania oil and gas industry organizations have rolled out a one-minute commercial video titled “Natural gas does that.”

Range Resources Corp. won permission from a Texas appeals court to proceed with a defamation lawsuit seeking $3 million in damages from a man who accused the company of tainting his drinking water with drilling activities in the Barnett Shale (see Shale Daily, April 4). Two of the company’s claims against Steven Lipsky were allowed to stand by the Second Court of Appeals in Fort Worth. However, it ordered the trial court in Weatherford, TX, to dismiss Range’s claims against Lipsky’s wife, Shyla, and environmental consultant Alisa Rich, who was hired to assist in the lawsuit. The plaintiffs have claimed that Range tainted the Lipsky water well, but the Railroad Commission of Texas found otherwise after it investigated. While the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency also had blamed Range for contaminating the well, the agency later backed down (see Shale Daily, Feb. 13; Feb. 21, 2012).

Six former presidents will be appearing in commercials supporting natural gas that will air in theaters before motion pictures this summer, thanks to a new advertising campaign by the American Clean Skies Foundation (ACSF), a nonprofit natural gas advocacy group.

Water use for hydraulic fracturing (fracking) in Colorado is expected to grow by 35% by 2015, but it will remain a minute portion of the state’s overall water use, according to a report by a trio of state agencies, including the Colorado Oil and Gas Conservation Commission (COGCC).

Two separate bills calling for a comprehensive study of hydraulic fracturing (hydrofracking) in North Carolina — a state where the practice is currently illegal — are expected to be sent to Democratic Gov. Bev Perdue this week.

In e-mail notices that arrived a minute apart Thursday morning, Southern California Gas declared a high-linepack OFO for the same day and then extended it through at least Friday. The tolerance for positive daily imbalances was set at 10% in both cases. The distributor also said it will lose 30 MMcf/d of storage injection capacity from next Tuesday through June 10 due to anomaly repairs on Line 1004.

Shale Gas and America’s Future, a 30-minute, made-for-TV film about the country’s natural gas drilling boom, has been released by the American Clean Skies Foundation (ACSF), a pro-natural gas industry group.

In last-minute talks, El Paso Corp. on Tuesday trumped an investment group’s bid and snapped up the Rockies-based exploration and production (E&P) unit of Flying J Inc. for $103.5 million.

In the wake of the last-minute rescue of the Bear Stearns financial house by JPMorgan Chase, the New York Mercantile Exchange (Nymex) and IntercontinentalExchange (ICE) spent last week reassuring traders that all their trading members, including Bear Energy and MF Global, were meeting their obligations.