Piceance

Under a settlement of a pending court case, the federal Bureau of Land Management (BLM) office in northwestern Colorado has agreed to reevaluate air quality impacts on 34 authorized, but not yet permitted, oil and natural gas drilling projects in the western part of the state.

A wildfire along the Western Slope in Colorado south of Rangely in the Piceance Basin prompted Denver-based Encana Oil & Gas (USA) Inc. to close 500 conventional natural gas wells in Rio Blanco County and evacuate an eight-worker plant. The shutdown was expected to continue at least through Friday, a Colorado-based Encana spokesperson told NGI.

Summit Investments has agreed to acquire Bear Tracker Energy LLC for $513 million from affiliates of GSO Capital Partners LP and Bear Tracker Investments LLC. Midstream company Bear Tracker is focused on oil and natural gas in North Dakota and Colorado.

Xcel Energy Inc., which provides power generation to Colorado customers, plans to build a 21-mile transmission line (230-kV) in the Piceance Basin to serve anticipated natural gas-fired generation to enhance reliability on the Western Slope. A 1,100 MW gas-fired generator also is planned near Mesquite, NV, on 250 acres of land managed by the Bureau of Land Management. A unit of EWP Renewables Corp. has filed an application with Nevada regulators to construct the plant, which would come online in two 550 MW phases in 2016 and 2017.

Continuing its strategy of increasing its acreage in the liquids-rich Bakken Shale and Three Forks Formation, a QEP Resources Inc. subsidiary has entered into two deals with multiple sellers to acquire “significant crude oil development properties” in the Williston Basin for an aggregate purchase price of close to $1.38 billion.

Two research projects to assess the oil shale potential of the Piceance Basin in northwestern Colorado are undergoing preliminary assessment by the Bureau of Land Management (BLM) in Colorado.

Gasco Energy Inc. said Thursday it plans to drill two conventional test wells for oil this fall in the Green River Formation, part of the company’s plans to de-risk thousands of acres it holds in the Uinta Basin in eastern Utah.

DCP Midstream LLC plans to build a 110 MMcf/d gas processing plant and high-pressure gathering system in Weld County, CO, to augment its position in the Denver-Julesburg (DJ) Basin, the company said Tuesday.

Drilling for natural gas can be safely conducted one-half mile from the site where a nuclear device was detonated 40 years ago in the Piceance Basin of western Colorado, according to a draft report released by the U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) last Thursday.