Necessarily

Unlike many producers today, Vanguard Natural Resources LLC is not necessarily focused on oil and natural gas liquids (NGL)-rich acquisitions. The company has done recent deals for both liquids and dry gas assets, instead focusing on margin and how the properties fit into its structure, CEO Scott Smith said Monday.

Driven primarily by continuing record oil production from the Bakken Shale formation, North Dakota’s economy is booming and is on target to produce more than $3.5 billion in tax revenues by the end of the state’s current two-year (2011-2013) fiscal year budget period, according to the state tax commissioner.

Climate change impacts are lessened when power plants burn natural gas instead of coal, but the same is not necessarily true when vehicles burn natural gas instead of traditional fuels because methane leakage more than offsets the clean-burning benefits of gas, according to a methane leakage model developed by the Environmental Defense Fund (EDF) and university researchers. However, the gas industry countered that the model relies on “outdated and incomplete” data.

Climate change impacts are lessened when power plants burn natural gas instead of coal, but the same is not necessarily true when vehicles burn natural gas instead of traditional fuels because methane leakage more than offsets the clean-burning benefits of gas, according to a methane leakage model developed by the Environmental Defense Fund (EDF) and university researchers. However, the gas industry countered that the model relies on “outdated and incomplete” data.

Climate change impacts are lessened when power plants burn natural gas instead of coal, but the same is not necessarily true when vehicles burn natural gas instead of traditional fuels because methane leakage more than offsets the clean-burning benefits of gas, according to a methane leakage model developed by the Environmental Defense Fund (EDF) and university researchers. However, the gas industry countered that the model relies on “outdated and incomplete” data.

Cheap natural gas, courtesy of shale plays, is bringing industry back to the United States, growing economies along the Gulf Coast, in the Northeast and elsewhere. But it has also made holding gas transportation capacity a more dicey prospect for end-users, and there is a risk that some of the energy industry’s risk management muscle could atrophy while on a diet of low prices and low volatility.

Texas environmental regulators are planning to launch monitoring of Eagle Ford Shale air emissions some time next year. What has been learned from ongoing emissions monitoring in the Barnett Shale will be applied in the South Texas play, an engineer with the Texas Commission on Environmental Quality (TCEQ) told NGI’s Shale Daily.

While NGL economics have been particularly good of late, they won’t necessarily stay that way. Prices could come under pressure as supply grows and demand softens, noted analysts at Tudor, Pickering, Holt & Co. Securities Inc. (TPH) last week.

Wall Street has a closer eye on the nation’s energy utility sector and the kind of state regulation impacting it, and so far in the new year it doesn’t necessarily like what it sees, according to John Bohn, a member of the California Public Utilities Commission (CPUC) who recently returned from a week-long series of conferences and meetings with financial analysts in New York City.