Pressure

As promised, Pennsylvania Gov. Tom Corbett did not include a severance tax on Marcellus Shale production in his first budget.

The “brute force” drilling process that unlocked North America’s shale deposits won’t easily be transferred overseas, Schlumberger Ltd. COO Paal Kibsgaard said Wednesday.

In the article “IEA Official: Shale Will Exert Downward Pressure on Gas, Oil Prices” (see Daily GPI, Feb. 4), NGI incorrectly attributed comments made by International Energy Agency (IEA) Deputy Executive Director Richard Jones to Jim Burkhard, who was also misidentified as IEA’s managing director. Burkhard is the managing director of Cambridge Energy Research Associates. NGI regrets the errors.

Drilling equipment demand in the global offshore, combined with unstoppable pressure pumping activity across North America, boosted the year/year performance for Houston’s National Oilwell Varco (NOV), executives said Thursday.

A 12-inch diameter high-pressure natural gas main ruptured in a northeast Philadelphia neighborhood Tuesday night, killing one Philadelphia Gas Works (PGW) employee and critically injuring three others.

Chilly temperatures kept upward pressure on a vast majority of cash point averages on Tuesday except for a handful of Northeast points, which recorded drops of $2.20 to more than $5 as the coldest temperatures associated with Sunday’s blizzard began to subside.

Cabot Oil & Gas Corp. has received a long-awaited air quality permit from Pennsylvania regulators to build three natural gas compressors in Susquehanna County, PA, in the heart of its Marcellus Shale operations.

With higher natural gas liquids (NGL) prices relative to natural gas, a continued surge in output from the gas shale plays and cryogenic gas processing technologies, new infrastructure continues to be in high demand for the U.S. liquids market, according to a report by Bentek Energy LLC.

With commissioners feeling the pressure of the deadlines imposed in the Dodd-Frank Wall Street Reform Act, the Commodity Futures Trading Commission (CFTC) Friday voted out proposals seeking to protect collateral of customers in cleared and uncleared swaps, provide real-time reporting for swaps and to report swap transactions to swap data repositories (SDR).