natural gas

Wide variations in natural gas pricing marked the week ended Feb. 21 as multi-dollar gains in the Midwest and Midcontinent along with a five-year high reached by the March futures offset large dollar losses in the East and smaller declines nearly everywhere else.

The natural gas pipeline partnership of Williams has agreed to buy the company’s Canada operations in Alberta for $1.2 billion. The assets include an oilsands off-gas processing plant near Fort McMurray, 260 miles of natural gas liquids (NGL) and olefins pipelines, and a NGL/olefins fractionation facility at Redwater. Williams Partners LP also is buying an expansion project underway at the Redwater facility. The operating results are expected to contribute distributable cash flow to the partnership of $135-160 million during the remaining 10 months of 2014, and $200-240 million in 2015. Williams owns 64% of the partnership.

Cimarex Energy Co. executives said the company has completed two wells targeting the Wolfcamp Shale of the Permian Basin with 10,000-foot laterals and plans to drill three more at that length as it looks to continue testing and lock up the majority of its leases by 2017.

A newly formed group of citizens in Denton, TX, which sits the northern edge of the Barnett Shale, said Tuesday it is gathering signatures for a ballot initiative that basically would ban unconventional drilling by banning new wells from performing hydraulic fracturing (fracking) within the city limits.

STW Resources Holding Corp. (STW) said one of its subsidiaries has completed building two pipeline projects to serve producers in the Permian Basin and has been awarded a contract to complete a third pipeline now under construction.

Physical natural gas prices for Friday delivery posted another set of strong gains in Thursday’s trading with market points having access to Canadian markets showing multi-dollar gains. A handful of points in South Texas saw minimal losses, but nearly every other location showed gains of a quarter to 50 cents or more.

Well freeze-offs and severe winter weather that stormed across North America beginning in late November had minimal impact on Williams and its extensive natural gas pipeline operations, CEO Alan Armstrong said Thursday.

At the end of what has proven so far to be an unusually harsh winter, FERC will hold a technical conference to evaluate the U.S. electric grid’s performance and review interaction between the natural gas and electricity markets, Acting Chairman Cheryl LaFleur said Thursday.

Exploration and production companies operating in Pennsylvania produced 3.3 Tcf of unconventional natural gas last year, an impressive increase of 1.3 Tcf over 2012 production, according to data compiled by Pennsylvania State University’s Marcellus Center for Outreach and Research (MCOR).