natural gas prices

Bismarck, ND-based MDU Resources Group is putting its oil/natural gas exploration and production (E&P) business unit on the sale block next year to focus more on its utility, pipeline/services and construction units, CEO David Goodin said Tuesday.

Dominion submitted a pre-filing request to FERC on Tuesday, asking regulators to begin an environmental review of its proposed $500 million Supply Header project in Pennsylvania and West Virginia.

Rex Energy Corp. is pulling back slightly on spending and its rig count in the Appalachian Basin for 2015 after building its asset base and experimenting with technologies and strategies in recent quarters, management said Wednesday in reporting third quarter results.

Given a mandate to optimize metrics across the board, Chesapeake Energy Corp.’s operations teams grabbed their axes and took to chopping, a task so well performed over the past year that CEO Doug Lawler on Wednesday declared them “weapons-grade.”

Tuesday’s midterm elections produced mixed results for the future of shale gas development in the Appalachian Basin, but the spotlight was overwhelmingly fixed on Democratic Governor-elect Tom Wolf’s defeat of Republican incumbent Gov. Tom Corbett and its implications for the industry.

Texas voters on Tuesday overwhelmingly approved Proposition 1, a constitutional amendment to split half of the oil and natural gas severance tax revenues between the state’s economic stabilization fund, AKA the Rainy Day Fund, and the state’s highway fund. The Rainy Day Fund now is estimated to be worth a total of about $9 billion. The Texas Oil & Gas Association had supported the amendment (see Daily GPI,Oct. 16). The approval is expected to give the Texas Department of Transportation up to $1.7 billion in the first year of implementation for highway maintenance and to add capacity. The amount of funding would fluctuate annually depending on oil and gas revenues.

Republican Ryan Sitton won a seat on the Railroad Commission of Texas (RRC), beating challenger Steve Brown, a Democrat. Sitton will fill the seat vacated by Barry Smitherman, who left the commission to pursue what became an unsuccessful bid for Texas attorney general. Sitton is an engineer and runs an oil and gas consulting firm. During the campaign, he released a white paper on the water-related issues faced by the energy industry (see Shale Daily,Oct. 9). Sitton was the energy industry favorite to win, and his campaign raised far more than Brown’s. He joins RRC Chairman Christi Craddick and Commissioner David Porter on the three-member panel.

Sempra Energy is gearing up to expand its Cameron, LA, liquefied natural gas (LNG) export project, pursue other export possibilities in Texas and Mexico, and assess the value of establishing a master limited partnership (MLP) backed by Cameron or other assets, senior executives said Tuesday.

Defeat of an anti-drilling measure in Santa Barbara County, CA, and the re-election of Colorado Gov. John Hickenlooper on Tuesday provided new encouragement to industry-backed supporters of hydraulic fracturing (fracking) and continued development of the nation’s unconventional energy resources.