Reduction

Producers active in Louisiana — where they enjoy an exemption from state severance taxes on production from horizontal wells — are increasingly eschewing conventional drilling to take advantage of the tax break, and that’s showing up in state revenue figures, according to a recent forecast from the state’s Legislative Fiscal Office. However, industry advocates advise: look at all the other taxes producers are paying.

The United States is seeing a resurgence in ethylene cracking facilities as chemical companies, which left the country a decade ago because of high natural gas feedstock prices, are returning to build new plants and reopen mothballed facilities due to lower gas prices brought on by the boom in shale production, said the head of the American Gas Association (AGA) Friday.

A newly devised state self-generation incentive program can proceed, including waste heat capture (cogeneration), pressure-reduction turbines, advanced energy storage, combined heat-power (CHP) gas turbines, micro-turbines and internal combustion engines.

Canaccord Genuity on Wednesday cut its 2012 natural gas price forecast by 50 cents to $4.00/Mcf on the strength of gas-directed and oil well-related gains in the U.S. onshore.

In a day-long hearing Thursday before New York legislators that was at times slowed by audience jeers and shouting, regulators and business leaders urged the state to support expanding natural gas development in the Marcellus Shale.

The monthly check from Chesapeake Exploration LLC will still be in the mail to Barnett Shale royalty owners, but some of them will find it to be a little lighter than in the past.

The pummeling of oil and natural gas producer stocks, which began last week, continued Monday as the Dow Jones Industrial Average plunged 634 points on the first day of trading after Standard & Poor’s (S&P) late Friday downgraded the United States credit rating from “AAA” to “AA+.”

Schlumberger Ltd. is seeing continued strength in its North American operations in part because of its hydraulic fracturing (fracking) technology, which is reducing time and costs to complete a well, management said Friday.

The disputed dollar impacts are sufficiently large and the deficit reduction talks equally intense so a full range of federal energy subsidies need to be debated by Congress and others, according to a white paper issued recently by the Washington DC-based Environmental and Energy Study Institute (EESI) which generally supports renewable energy.