Program

The British Columbia Oil and Gas Commission has enacted new rules for inline well tests and will launch a “fact-finding program” in May to study air quality in the Peace River area, where natural gas shale exploration programs are booming, the minister of Energy, Mines and Petroleum Resources said Thursday.

The British Columbia Oil and Gas Commission has enacted new rules for inline well tests and will launch a “fact-finding program” in May to study air quality in the Peace River area, where natural gas shale exploration programs are booming, the minister of Energy, Mines and Petroleum Resources said Thursday.

The U.S. Supreme Court upheld a lower court’s decision that a distributor could owe county taxes on natural gas that it stores temporarily along the interstate gas pipeline system. Kansas City, MO-based Missouri Gas Energy (MGE), a subsidiary of Southern Union, challenged the Oklahoma Supreme Court decision, which held that MGE owed Woods County, OK, taxes for gas stored in the North Hopeton storage facility in the Oklahoma Panhandle. Before the high court, MGE argued that it was immune to the taxation under the the Commerce Clause. Millions of dollars were at stake in the case. Harriet Miers, former White House counsel and former President George W. Bush’s one-time nominee for the Supreme Court, filed the petition for certiorari in 2009 on behalf of MGE (see NGI, Oct. 19, 2009). At issue in the case was whether states and local governments have the power to tax a distributor’s natural gas that is stored temporarily in an interstate pipeline system.

The third phase of a Marcellus Shale gas processing infrastructure expansion program has been completed, adding 120 MMcf/d of cryogenic processing capacity, Range Resources Corp. said Monday.

Chevron Corp. said Thursday it will spend $21.6 billion on its capital and exploratory program for 2010, including $4.1 billion in the United States. Spending will be down 5% from projected 2009 spending.

A study that contended that Spain’s government-subsidized green jobs program has destroyed 2.2 jobs for every new green job created and offered “a note of caution” to U.S. policymakers was based on non traditional research methodologies, lacked supporting statistics and ignored policy differences between the two countries, according to a white paper issued by the Department of Energy’s National Renewable Energy Laboratory (NREL).

A study that contended that Spain’s government-subsidized green jobs program has destroyed 2.2 jobs for every new green job created and offered “a note of caution” to U.S. policymakers was based on non traditional research methodologies, lacked supporting statistics and ignored policy differences between the two countries, according to a white paper issued by the Department of Energy’s National Renewable Energy Laboratory (NREL).

After bouncing back and forth in small increments, it was only fitting that May natural gas futures would keep to the program on Friday by gaining only 1.9 cents to close at $3.801, which was 6.4 cents higher than their close in the previous week.

Interior Secretary Ken Salazar’s decision earlier this month to delay completion of a review of the new five-year (2010-2015) leasing program (see Daily GPI, Feb. 11) had the same effect as reinstating the moratorium on oil and natural gas drilling in the federal Outer Continental Shelf (OCS), a high-ranking Republican told a House panel Wednesday.