Situation

Citing growing oil production from shale plays, Enterprise Products Partners LP and Enbridge Inc. said Thursday they plan to construct a pipeline to transport crude oil from the oversupplied hub at Cushing, OK, to the Texas Gulf Coast refining complex. Enterprise recently scrapped plans to pursue a similar project with a different partner.

Texas keeps getting hotter and drier, and aquifer water levels keep declining as homeowners, farmers and oil and gas drillers keep pumping water for their various uses. However, one water watcher told NGI’s Shale Daily he does not expect curtailments on water use for drilling/hydraulic fracturing (fracking) in the Eagle Ford Shale.

Despite an increasingly bullish storage situation, July natural gas continued lower Friday as traders see a return of more mild summer weather. At the close July had fallen 8.7 cents to $4.325, which is 43.2 cents lower than the previous week’s close.

The “brute force” drilling process that unlocked North America’s shale deposits won’t easily be transferred overseas, Schlumberger Ltd. COO Paal Kibsgaard said Wednesday.

Legislation being drafted by West Virginia Gov. Earl Ray Tomblin’s administration includes a statutory pooling provision for shallow horizontal wells, which would include Marcellus Shale drilling in the state, according to Nick Casey, a member of the Lewis Glasser Casey & Rollins law firm in Charleston, WV.

California’s wholesale electricity situation looks good for this summer’s peak-demand periods, but in the longer term the state’s aggressive push to get more renewable resource-based power continues to worry the head of the California Independent System Operator (CAISO), Yakout Mansour. The CAISO CEO held a conference call with reporters last Monday to mark the release of the grid operator’s annual market performance report, a newly approved five-year strategy and CAISO’s 10th anniversary of operations.

After the May natural gas futures contract inexplicably shot 30.1 cents higher on Monday, traders on Tuesday corrected the situation, but they waited until the last minute to do so. The prompt month ended up closing out Tuesday’s regular session at $9.724, down 37.7 cents from Monday’s finish.

Based on “the urgency of the situation caused by the nexus between the upcoming storage injection season and the lack of clarity in Commission policy,” Constellation Energy Commodities Group Inc. has submitted an emergency request for expedited action on FERC’s notice of proposed rulemaking (NOPR) to remove the price cap on short-term releases of transportation capacity and provide a partial exemption for capacity released under asset management arrangements (AMA).

Based on “the urgency of the situation caused by the nexus between the upcoming storage injection season and the lack of clarity in Commission policy,” Constellation Energy Commodities Group Inc. has submitted an emergency request for expedited action on FERC’s notice of proposed rulemaking (NOPR) to remove the price cap on short-term releases of transportation capacity and provide a partial exemption for capacity released under asset management arrangements (AMA).