Secretary

More than 60 members of Congress Tuesday wrote a letter to Interior Secretary Ken Salazar protesting the inclusion of Arctic sales in the federal government’s proposed five-year leasing plan for the Outer Continental Shelf.

A recent analysis of hydraulic fracturing (fracking) data from fracfocus.org and oil and gas well records from eight states, which concluded that nearly half of the wells fracked during the last nine months of 2011 were not disclosed on the website, doesn’t tell the whole story, according to industry sources. The industry supports the disclosure website and continues to flood it with well data, they said.

Interior Secretary Ken Salazar should not be held in contempt for imposing a second moratorium on deepwater drilling in the Gulf of Mexico in 2010 after a judge in Louisiana overturned the department’s initial ban, a Justice Department attorney argued Wednesday before the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit in New Orleans.

As part of the Obama administration’s “all-of-the-above energy strategy,” Interior Secretary Ken Salazar last week said the agency will offer more than 20 million acres offshore Texas for oil and natural gas exploration and development in a year-end lease sale that will include all of the available unleased areas in the Western Gulf of Mexico (GOM) Planning Area.

As part of the Obama administration’s “all-of-the-above energy strategy,” Interior Secretary Ken Salazar said Monday that the agency will offer more than 20 million acres offshore Texas for oil and natural gas exploration and development in a year-end lease sale that will include all of the available unleased areas in the Western Gulf of Mexico (GOM) Planning Area.

A fourth company is considering plans to build an ethane cracker in West Virginia, according to state Commerce Secretary Keith Burdette.

A fourth company is considering plans to build an ethane cracker in West Virginia, according to state Commerce Secretary Keith Burdette.

A bipartisan coalition of House lawmakers has called on Energy Secretary Steven Chu to expedite the approval of U.S. company applications to export liquefied natural gas (LNG) to foreign countries.

U.S. Department of Interior (DOI) Secretary Ken Salazar Thursday offered the final version of the department’s OCS [Outer Continental Shelf] Oil and Gas Leasing Program for 2012-2017, sticking to tried and true areas in the Gulf of Mexico (GOM) and holding out delayed possibilities in Alaska.