Phase

With an eye for the developing shale potential in Kansas, Irvine, CA-based startup New Western Energy Corp. said Wednesday it has obtained a 90% working interest in the 550-acre Smith Oil & Gas Lease in Chautauqua County, KS. The interest is in acreage that sits adjacent to 1,700 acres that New Western holds in the B&W Oil & Gas Lease.

Pennsylvania issued its 3,000th Marcellus Shale drilling permit of the year in November, but the final well count for 2011 is likely to fall just shy of 2,000, if drilling remains at its current pace.

Producers in northeastern Pennsylvania will get a respite from the region’s pipeline capacity pinch — but not for long — according to Bentek Energy LLC.

As a result of the Environmental Protection Agency’s (EPA) Phase II Greenhouse Gas tailoring rule, which went into effect in July, minor sources of pollution — including gas processing plants, fractionating plants, compressor stations and other midstream energy assets — are now considered major source pollutants and thus are subject to more stringent regulation, said a partner with a major Washington, DC-based law firm.

In voting out four major proposed rules last Wednesday, the Commodity Futures Trading Commission (CFTC) “substantially completed the proposal phase” of the regulatory reforms called for under the sweeping Dodd-Frank Wall Street Reform Act. The Commission and the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) have scheduled a roundtable on Monday and Tuesday to discuss the schedule for implementing the final rules for swaps and security-based swaps under Dodd-Frank. And the CFTC has reopened the comment period on all of its proposals.

In voting out four major proposed rules Wednesday, the Commodity Futures Trading Commission (CFTC) “substantially completed the proposal phase” of implementing the sweeping Dodd-Frank Wall Street Reform Act.

Encana Corp. has joined its Horn River producer peers Apache Corp. and EOG Resources Inc. in the Kitimat liquefied natural gas (LNG) export terminal project on the west coast of central British Columbia (BC) and its associated gas pipeline. Encana is taking a 30% stake in the project, which will target Asian markets with western Canadian gas supplies.

Noting that the companies are still in the “investigative phase,” a Michigan-based spokesperson for Fiat and Chrysler said the automakers aren’t ruling out any alternative transportation fuels for their future marketing efforts in the United States. Natural gas is just one of several options being explored, and electric vehicles (EV) and clean diesel are included in the mix.

The G-20 nations Sunday in Toronto pledged to continue with their effort to phase out subsidies for oil, natural gas and coal. But the agreement — like the one forged at the summit in Pittsburgh last year — lacks teeth because it doesn’t include a timetable for when the subsidies should be unwound (see Daily GPI, Sept. 28, 2009).