Southwest

The Arlington, TX, City Council voted 8-1 to award Chesapeake Energy Corp. for its Bobcat 1H well on a site that is about a half-mile southwest of the Cowboys Stadium. The approval followed a public hearing and an agreement by Chesapeake to coordinate heavy truck traffic around events at the stadium and the nearby Rangers Ballpark, the Fort Worth Star-Telegram reported. As many as a dozen wells could be placed on Chesapeake’s Truman site accessing the mineral resources of about 1,200 property owners. Some area residents had expressed concerns about traffic and pollution, but others at the council meeting said they supported development of their mineral rights.

Severe weather conditions early this month caused a double whammy for the two interstate natural gas pipelines serving the Southwest, and the result was curtailments by some of the distribution utilities, particularly in New Mexico, representatives from Transwestern and El Paso Natural Gas pipeline units told a U.S. Senate energy committee informational hearing Monday in Albuquerque, NM.

FERC last week launched a staff inquiry into the energy disruptions that occurred across the Southwest early this month as a result of a severe cold snap that affected energy operations from Southern California to Texas from the wellhead to the burnertip (see NGI, Feb. 7).

FERC on Monday launched a staff inquiry into the energy disruptions that occurred across the Southwest early this month as a result of a severe cold snap that affected energy operations from Southern California to Texas from the wellhead to the burnertip (see Daily GPI, Feb. 7).

Last week’s freezing temperatures in the Southwest, which froze some natural gas wells in Texas’ Barnett Shale and caused rolling blackouts in much of the state, were the most severe test of Texas natural gas deliverability since the winter of 1989, a reliability council representative told the Railroad Commission of Texas (RRC) Tuesday.

Through EQT Corp.’s experience in the “shale revolution” — the 120-year old company expects to have 100 wells in the Marcellus Shale in southwest Pennsylvania and northern West Virginia by the end of the year — it has learned several lessons of value to other companies, according to CEO David Porges.

A five-week air quality study found no air contaminant emission levels indicating problems for residents living near Marcellus Shale natural gas operations in southwestern Pennsylvania’s Greene and Washington counties, the state’s Department of Environmental Protection (DEP) said Monday.

Fall may have officially begun a day earlier, but with parts of the Northeast joining the South and desert Southwest in conditions that felt more like summer, prices continued to rise at nearly all points Thursday. The cash market got an additional boost from Wednesday’s 4.7-cent gain by October futures, and a concern about the pending formation of a new tropical storm in the Caribbean likely played a role.

The Federal Energy Regulatory Commission approved Cadeville Gas Storage LLC’s application to build a planned gas storage facility in Ouachita Parish, LA, approximately 10 miles southwest of Monroe. Storage services are scheduled to begin in 2012. The three- to four-turn facility is being designed to provide a peak deliverability of 420 MMcf/d and a peak injection of 420 MMcf/d. Cadeville plans to convert a depleted gas reservoir to develop a total of 16.5 Bcf of working capacity. The facility would have the ability to interconnect to Tennessee Gas Pipeline Line 100, Gulf South’s Middle 30, Gulf South’s 42-inch East Texas to Mississippi Expansion, Texas Gas Transmission, CenterPoint Energy Line CP and Energy Transfer Partners’ 42″ Tiger Pipeline. Open seasons held in 2009 (see NGI, April 6, 2009) and earlier this summer (see NGI, May 31) received total bids for more than twice the amount of working gas capacity proposed in its application, according to Cadeville.