Northern

Petroleos Mexicanos (Pemex) has launched an investigation following an explosion at a natural gas compression facility in the northern Mexico border town of Reynosa, near McAllen, TX, where at least 29 people were killed and as many as 50 more were injured. Seven people reportedly were missing.

The U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit in New Orleans has ruled against Chesapeake Energy Corp. in its bid to reverse a $19.7 million judgment over a canceled oil and gas lease offer in Texas, a decision that may hold implications on canceled lease claims by mineral rights owners in several other states.

With energy demand high and producers climbing over each other in the Marcellus Shale region, the Northeast remains “ripe with bottlenecks,” and it’s likely to get more congested before natural gas infrastructure is completed, Williams CEO Alan Armstrong said Wednesday.

Chesapeake Energy Corp. is selling legacy properties in the Cana Woodford Shale, including the rights to 298 producing wells, “because it does not have the drilling budget to adequately develop the abundant additional opportunities in the area,” according to a sales listing. Ninety-eight percent of the leases are held by production.

Plains All American Pipeline LP is wrapping up more than 145 miles of crude oil pipeline projects that are expected to add 200,000 b/d of takeaway capacity from the Bone Spring, Spraberry and Wolfberry producing areas in nine West Texas counties.

FERC has approved two orders that allow the El Paso Natural Gas and Kinder Morgan Texas pipeline systems to increase natural gas exports to northern Mexico.

Even if all drilling rigs were removed from the northern Marcellus Shale region and current drilling ceased, dry gas production in northeastern Pennsylvania would continue growing for 16 months, thanks to a large inventory of nonproducing wells and high initial production (IP) rates, Bentek Energy LLC said in a market note. “In fact, if zero rigs were operating there, production could still grow from approximately 4.1 Bcf/d today to 5.4 Bcf/d by September 2013, a 31% increase that results exclusively from working off the existing backlog of 1,000 nonproducing wells in the region,” the firm said. The assumptions in its analysis are that the 12-month average completion rate is carried forward and the average IP rate in the area is 6,500 Mcf/d. A “typical” Marcellus decline curve is also assumed. Potential pipeline capacity constraints were not included in the analysis.

Gov. Bev Perdue issued an executive order on Monday calling on various state agencies to organize a work group to study hydraulic fracturing (fracking) and then make recommendations for the best ways to regulate the practice.

While over recent months the Marcellus and Utica shales have attracted most of the attention focused on shale gas supplies, the southeastern United States — where the shale boom hit earlier — is still dealing with the consequences of shifting supplies, according to a report by LCI Energy Insight and Energy Ventures Analysis.