Rights

A 14.7-million-acre (23,000-square-mile) spread of legacy oil and natural gas properties formed Monday when Canadian Natural Resources Ltd. (CNRL) and PrairieSky Royalty Ltd. agreed to pool their private drilling rights in Saskatchewan, Alberta and British Columbia.

California’s state-run water rights allocation system has given away five times more in volumes than the average annual surface water supplies available through natural runoff, according to California researchers.

With the advent of increased drilling on Montana’s portion of the Bakken Shale play and more importantly other wildcatting areas of the state, a new state program for temporary leasing of water rights has kicked off, anticipating added demand for water supplies to support hydraulic fracturing (fracking).

The drilling rights to an estimated 13,000 acres in New York’s Southern Tier will be released and litigation dropped as part of a major settlement reached Monday by Chesapeake Energy Corp. and about 200 landowners.

With domestic natural gas production reaching an “unprecedented” level, net imports of gas into the United States in 2012 fell 23% while total gas exports increased about 8%, according to the U.S. Energy Information Administration (EIA).

Spot prices for U.S. natural gas at most major trading points increased on average 40-60% in the first half of 2013 (1H2013) from a year earlier as demand eclipsed supply, the U.S. Energy Information Administration (EIA) reported last week.

The opening of the Mariner West I ethane pipeline and new processing plants should provide some relief to current wet gas constraints in the Marcellus and Utica shales, and the plays should be largely de-bottlenecked by the end of next year, according to analysts at Barclays.

The capacity of underground natural gas storage facilities increased by about 2% from November 2011 to November 2012, the Energy Information Administration (EIA) said in a new report. The increase was seen in both demonstrated maximum and design capacities.

Oneok Inc. plans to spin off its natural gas distribution business to create ONE Gas Inc., which would be one of the largest gas utilities in the United States with more than two million customers in three states and the only publicly traded, 100% regulated, pure-play gas distribution utility.