Processing

Canyon Midstream Partners LLC has signed separate gathering and processing agreements with Apache Corp. and XTO Energy Inc. for midstream services on its James Lake system in the Permian Basin, the company said Thursday.

Two weeks after the Opal, WY, natural gas processing facility and major gas hub was shuttered due to an explosion and fire, capacity has returned to previous levels of about 1.1 Bcf/d, Williams Partners LP said Tuesday.

Gastar Exploration Ltd.said it is closing on the sale of its East Texas properties toCubic Energy Inc., a transaction that was delayed multiple times to accommodate the financing needs of Cubic (seeShale Daily,Sept. 25). Gastar said it expects to receive $39.2 million in proceeds in addition to the $4.7 million deposit previously paid by Cubic by Oct. 2. The deal was announced in April (seeShale Daily,April 23).

The Interior Department’s Bureau of Land Management (BLM) needs better data to track the processing times for applications of permits to drill (APD) and to prioritize the inspections of oil and natural gas wells on federal lands, the Government Accountability Office (GAO) said in a new report.

Following an upswing in the percentage of associated gas being flared in the most recent monthly oil/natural statistics, albeit due to gas processing and electric grid breakdowns, North Dakota state officials are stepping up their efforts to speed up the reduction of flaring, which again hangs at 30%. The state wants new programs or rules in place early next year.

Targa Resources Partners LP’sTarga Midstream Services LLC(TMS) experienced a fire Thursday morning at the Saunders gas processing facility in Lea County, NM. All workers were accounted for, and the fire was contained and then extinguished. The partnership’s ownership in the facility is held throughVersado Gas Processors LLC, a joint venture that is 63% owned by the partnership and 37% owned byChevron U.S.A. Inc.TMS serves as the operator of the Versado system. Saunders is the smallest gas processing plant in the Versado system, with about 70 MMcf/d of the Versado system’s approximately 280 MMcf/d gross processing capacity.

Oneok Partners LP said it plans to invest $440 million in Wyoming’s Powder River Basin to buy a natural gas liquids (NGL) processing facility and to upgrade related infrastructure.

Blue Racer Midstream LLC, designed to provide expanded services over the next three years in the Utica and Marcellus shales, on Thursday secured an initial five-year, $800 million credit facility that could be expanded to $1 billion.

A bipartisan coalition of 34 senators has called on the Department of Energy (DOE) to speed up its processing of permit requests to export liquefied natural gas (LNG) to foreign countries with which the United States does not have have a free trade agreement (non-FTA). At the current rate, the senators estimated that it could take the department up to two years to approve all of the non-FTA permits pending at DOE.