Still

North Dakota again set new all-time highs for oil and natural gas production, drilling permits issued and producing wells in August, according to the latest report from state Department of Mineral Resources (DMR) Director Lynn Helms. The average price for sweet crude was up, too.

A year-long study has concluded that hydraulic fracturing (fracking) in an urban oilfield in the Los Angeles area will not harm the environment.

A Maryland circuit court judge listened to lawyers for Dominion Resources Inc. and two environmental groups on Monday, the opening salvo in lawsuit over a proposed natural gas liquefaction facility, but ultimately decided to take the case under advisement.

Mixed with the solid reviews about all-time record highs for monthly natural gas and oil production in North Dakota’s Bakken Shale and Williston Basin region, the director of the state’s Department of Mineral Resources (DMR) sounded words of caution that the drilling boom is showing signs of easing, but not because production has slowed much.

Shale gas plays generally, and the still-fledgling Utica play specifically, are promoting the potential for a reemergence of the U.S. industrial sector, according to industry experts who spoke Monday at the opening of the LDC Gas Forum Midcontinent meeting in Chicago.

Isaac may be a memory to some along Louisiana’s Gulf Coast but the oil and natural gas industry was continuing Friday to ramp up production at some facilities still shut in after the Category 1 hurricane blew in late last month.

Although it recently dropped out of a Western Canada gas-to-liquids (GTL) project with Sasol Canada (see Shale Daily, June 29), Talisman Energy Inc. still foresees monetizing its Montney Shale reserves through “some form of conversion process,” CEO John Manzoni told financial analysts during an earnings conference call. Manzoni said the Montney resource is “big enough, it’s strategic enough, it’s material enough to be in some form of conversion process, which naturally now is more likely to be LNG [liquefied natural gas] then GTL, if that’s the case.” Multiple projects have been proposed to liquefy western Canadian gas and ship it to overseas markets (see Shale Daily, July 31). Manzoni alluded to the LNG projects and said, “…in the context of all of that, we are considering all options and continue to do so…for our Montney resource, how best to create the maximum value for Talisman at the right time for our Montney resource, which is very big and very strategic.”

After glutted markets and gutted prices for natural gas cut the cost motive, environmental anxiety still drives an accelerating Alberta quest to reduce fuel consumption by oilsands projects.

In one remote corner of North America natural gas still fetches a price that covers its costs, including drilling and pipeline construction. On the Mackenzie Delta an environmental assessment is beginning on a supply project called Ikhil for Inuvik, the biggest town in the Canadian land of the midnight sun.