People

Peoples Natural Gas has struck a deal to acquire Delta Natural Gas of Winchester, KY, which serves 36,000 customers in central and southeastern Kentucky.

Pennsylvania Gov. Tom Wolf visited Pittsburgh on Tuesday to hail a partnership between the Environmental Defense Fund (EDF), Google, Peoples Natural Gas and Carnegie Mellon University that is identifying and mapping methane leaks from the city’s distribution pipelines.

The natural gas industry needs to change its approach if it wants to fix its messaging problem, according to Richard Smead, RBN Energy LLC managing director of advisory services.

The energy market downturn has played havoc with the bottom line for the oil and gas industry, but it has had a silver lining, weeding out the bottom feeders, the “brilliant jerks,” who may have been doing their jobs but who were unconcerned about a company’s success, energy executives said Wednesday.

With recent strengthening of oil prices, the outlook for the next wave of exploration and production company restructurings has improved somewhat, an attorney in the Baker Botts LLP financial restructuring practice told NGI’s Shale Daily. If the improvement sticks, it will be none too soon for many. For now, though, a painful reckoning continues.

The U.S. mining/extraction industry, which includes the oil and gas sectors, had 104,700 fewer jobs in September than a year ago, the U.S. Department of Labor reported Friday.

The pioneering shale gas and oil developers have to be unshackled by “prison guards of the past” to allow the United States to achieve energy independence, former House Speaker Newt Gingrich said on the closing day of the Shale Insight conference in Philadelphia.

Marcia Backus, 59, has been named vice president and general counsel ofOccidental Petroleum Corp.effective Oct. 1. Backus is a partner atVinson & Elkins, where she has run the law firm’s energy transactions/projects practice group. Backus earned her law degree from theUniversity of Texasat Austin, where she co-founded the law school’s Center for Women in Law.

The shale gas and oil revolution has created a 20-year opportunity for technology and sustainable economic development, but to realize its full potential, the people who think about energy will have to adopt a new mindset, Joseph Stanislaw said in a new Deloitte whitepaper, in which he argues that shale resources should be a bridge to a lower-carbon future.