Mountain

The chief eco-watchdog of the United States has set out to jump north across the border and bark in Canada.

The natural gas cash market worked lower by 9 cents on average Tuesday for Wednesday delivery with all market and producing areas declining. Rocky Mountain points were hit hard, but locations in the Midwest were weak as well. Most major trading hubs lost anywhere from a nickel to a dime. At the close of futures trading the May natural gas contract had fallen 6.5 cents to $4.017 and June was off 6.1 cents to $4.057. May crude oil rose 84 cents to $94.20/bbl.

A total of 29 parcels comprising 35,889 acres in a promising unconventional find in northeastern Nevada were sold to six companies for a total of $1.27 million by the Bureau of Land Management (BLM) during its quarterly oil and gas competitive lease sale held in Reno, NV, the agency said.

The FracTracker Alliance and Mountain Watershed Association (MWA) are offering free training sessions across southeastern Pennsylvania for citizens who want to utilize the mapping capability of fractracker.org, a web-based tool for tracking and visualizing data related to shale gas extraction operations. The sessions “will show people how to find where drilling operations are located and learn more about them, according to MWA, which said the tool is already being used by citizen water monitoring volunteers and community advocates. Sessions are scheduled in Washington County Feb. 26, Butler County March 26, and Westmoreland County April 30, with more sessions planned through October. Information and registration is available by contacting Melissa Troutman (melissa@mtwatershed.com, (724) 455-4200 ext 6). The training sessions are sponsored by the Heinz Endowments (see Shale Daily, Sept. 2, 2011).

Natural gas is little more than an afterthought in a recent Rocky Mountain Institute (RMI) report that recommends a combination of distributed generation and demand-side resources be applied as soon as possible to make up for the continuing outage at the 2,200 MW San Onofre Nuclear Generating Station (Songs) along the Southern California coast.

Antero Resources is selling all of its natural gas and pipeline assets in the Piceance Basin for $325 million in cash plus assumption of its Rocky Mountain firm transportation obligations in order to focus more on the Marcellus and Utica shales.

Noble Energy Inc. has agreed to sell oil and natural gas properties in Kansas, including about 250 producing wells on approximately 14,000 net acres, to an affiliate of Citation Oil & Gas Corp. for $140 million as part of an ongoing divestiture plan, the Houston-based company said Monday.

Lawmakers in the Vermont House of Representatives were to vote Friday on a bill that would ban hydraulic fracturing (fracking) in the Green Mountain State and require regulators with the state Agency of Natural Resources (ANR) to submit a report by 2015 on the best ways to regulate the practice.

Physical gas prices overall traded about 5 cents lower Thursday, but Rocky Mountain producers and marketers got hit with a double whammy of a force majeure on a major pipeline hauling gas to California and a plunge in hydro-derived electricity prices. Eastern and Gulf points endured nominal losses.