Partnership

Tallgrass Energy Partners LP of Overland Park, KS, is buying a slate of assets from Kinder Morgan Energy Partners LP (KMP) that the partnership is selling to comply with antitrust stipulations related to Kinder Morgan Inc.’s (KMI) recent acquisition of El Paso Corp.

One month after announcing that it was abandoning a potential partnership strategy to help develop its Eagle Ford Shale acreage in favor of a “go-it-alone plan,” Denver-based Forest Oil Corp. said it has entered into an agreement to sell the majority of its East Texas natural gas gathering assets to a subsidiary of Tristate Midstream II LLC for proceeds of $34 million.

Health care providers Guthrie Health and Geisinger Health System have formed a partnership to study the health impacts of Marcellus Shale gas drilling, saying it will be “the first large-scale, scientifically rigorous assessment of the health effects of” natural gas production.

Tallgrass Energy Partners LP of Overland Park, KS, is buying a slate of assets from Kinder Morgan Energy Partners LP (KMP) that the partnership is selling to comply with antitrust stipulations related to Kinder Morgan Inc.’s (KMI) recent acquisition of El Paso Corp.

ExxonMobil Corp. and Russia’s OAO Rosneft on Friday clinched a partnership agreement to develop oil reserves in tight, low-permeability formations in Western Siberia using advanced drilling technologies that ExxonMobil has employed successfully in North America’s onshore.

MarkWest Utica EMG LLC, a partnership between Appalachian midstream provider MarkWest Energy Partners LP and private equity fund The Energy and Minerals Group (EMG), has secured agreements to process and transport Gulfport Energy Corp.’s growing natural gas volumes from three eastern Ohio counties between now and 2014. The partners also are expanding one Utica Shale midstream facility and building a new plant to ensure producers have enough fractionation services available.

The expansion of Boardwalk Field Services LLC’s Eagle Ford Shale gathering system and construction of an associated cryogenic gas processing plant is on schedule, as is work on the Boardwalk Pipeline Partners LP (BPP) subsidiary’s $90 million Marcellus Shale gathering system project, according to company officials. “We expect that a portion of our Marcellus gathering line will go into service in the very near future, and additional portions of the gathering line will go into service over the next 12 to 24 months,” BPP CEO Stan Horten said during a conference call with financial analysts. Boardwalk is adding about 55 miles of 20- and 24-inch gathering pipeline to its existing 340-mile South Texas gathering system (see Shale Daily, Feb. 7). Once complete, the combined pipeline system will have the capability to move more than 300 MMcf/d of liquids-rich gas from Karnes and Dewitt counties in the heart of the Eagle Ford play. The Marcellus gathering system in northeastern Pennsylvania is designed to connect Southwestern Energy Co. wells in the region to Tennessee Gas Pipeline Co.’s (TGP) Line 300 (see Shale Daily, Oct. 11, 2011). BPP’s 1Q2012 operating revenues were $312.9 million, a 1% increase from $311 million during 1Q2011, and the Houston-based partnership’s net income was $92.6 million, a 12% increase from $83 million a year ago.

Russia’s OAO Rosneft will put its boots and drilling crews on the ground in the United States and Canada through several partnership agreements completed with ExxonMobil Corp. on Monday.

ExxonMobil Corp., which made strategic decisions in recent years to capture massive unconventional shale gas and tight oil resources in North America, is now seeing the continent undergoing a “historic energy transformation,” CEO Rex Tillerson said Friday.