Protesters

FERC Chairman Norman Bay had to be escorted away after “keep it in the ground” protesters rushed the stage during his speech at a power producers conference in New York Wednesday.

The U.S. Bureau of Land Management (BLM) office in Reno, NV, held an oil/natural gas lease sale involving more than 50,000 acres in two northern counties on Tuesday, and the market spoke loud and clear above the chanting of protesters from the national “Keep It in the Ground” campaign that wants to end leasing on public and tribal lands.

A judge in New Brunswick has granted Southwestern Energy Co. (SWN) a two-week extension to an injunction designed to keep anti-shale protesters away while the company wraps up seismic testing in the province.

A fresh round of protests over shale development has erupted in New Brunswick, with police and demonstrators opposed to hydraulic fracturing (fracking) clashing at the site of a violent protest last month near the town of Rexton.

The pioneering shale gas and oil developers have to be unshackled by “prison guards of the past” to allow the United States to achieve energy independence, former House Speaker Newt Gingrich said on the closing day of the Shale Insight conference in Philadelphia.

Natural gas and oil companies concerned that fringe protesters will succeed in delaying or canceling projects shouldn’t be, said the chief scientist for The Nature Conservancy. New technology eventually will be embraced, he said, but it will take time.

Protesters aiming to “Stop the Frack Attack” were planning to hold a three-day meeting in the nation’s capital at the end of this week for obstructionist training sessions and lobbying of Congress, to be followed by a Saturday afternoon demonstration on the West Lawn of the Capitol.

Despite a handful of protesters, the Susquehanna River Basin Commission (SRBC) on Thursday voted to approve 42 water withdrawal permit applications, including most that it had approved at a disrupted meeting in December.

As a flurry of well site bombings by still-unknown protesters in 2008 and 2009 fades into history, plans are advancing to accelerate natural gas development near the Dawson Creek starting point of the Alaska Highway in northeastern British Columbia (BC).