Surface

A new El Nino event — warming of surface temperatures in the eastern equatorial Pacific ocean — combined with cooler Atlantic ocean temperatures is likely to make the 2009 Atlantic hurricane season “relatively quiet,” Andover, MA-based WSI Corp. said Monday.

Questions are continuing to surface about the large futures market positions in natural gas that have been taken by the United States Natural Gas Fund LP (UNG), an exchange-traded fund that is described as a pure play, on the price of natural gas in the front-month futures contract.

Questions are continuing to surface about the large futures market positions in natural gas that have been taken by the United States Natural Gas Fund, LP (UNG), an exchange-traded fund that is described as a pure play on the price of natural gas in the front-month futures contract.

After completing 27 mergers and acquisitions in 15 years, Devon Energy Corp. always had a surplus of people, but the “new” people masked a problem that began to surface about two years ago, the company’s manager of project support said Wednesday. Ten percent of Devon’s workforce now is eligible for early retirement and nearly 60% will be eligible to leave within 10 years, and the producer now is stepping up its recruitment and retention program.

Five different land use plans (LUP) now in place in the south-central part of Utah that cover about 554,000 acres of public land surface estate administered by the Bureau of Land Management (BLM) may be exchanged for one all-encompassing resource management plan (RMP). Under BLM’s preferred alternative, about 48% of the publicly administered land in the Kanab, UT, region would be open for oil and natural gas leasing.

Talisman Energy Inc. said it hit pay dirt again in the Alberta Foothills. A new well tested at a gross rate of 14 MMcf/d but if left unrestricted by surface equipment would have had an estimated absolute open flow rate potential of 372 MMcf/d and estimated wellhead absolute open flow rate potential of 94 MMcf/d. The well is expected to be tied-in during the second quarter of 2007.

Talisman Energy Inc. said it hit pay dirt again in the Alberta Foothills. A new well tested at a gross rate of 14 MMcf/d but if left unrestricted by surface equipment would have had an estimated absolute open flow rate potential of 372 MMcf/d and estimated wellhead absolute open flow rate potential of 94 MMcf/d. The well is expected to be tied-in during the second quarter of 2007.

Cash prices rebounded by double-digit amounts at all points Monday in response to a surface low-pressure area in the southern Gulf of Mexico moving northward toward the Texas coast and heat levels returning to seasonable levels in the Northeast and Midwest market areas.

Calendar year 2005 had the highest global surface temperature in more than a century, narrowly edging out 1998 — the warmest previous year — as the warmest year on record, according to James Hansen, director of NASA’s Goddard Institute for Space Studies.