Tertiary

Denbury Resources Inc. said Monday that it has completed the first phase of its sale of 196,000 net acres in the Bakken Shale to ExxonMobil Corp. for $1.6 billion in cash and ExxonMobil’s operating interests in Webster Field in Texas, Hartzog Draw Field in Wyoming and an interest in the Carbon Dioxide (CO2) reserves in ExxonMobil’s LaBarge Field in Wyoming.

The Department of Energy (DOE) on Friday said it will invest $5.6 million in more than a dozen research projects to increase understanding of the potential of methane hydrates as an energy source.

In a landmark discovery, high saturations of natural gas hydrates have been discovered within reservoir-quality sands in the Lower Tertiary of the Gulf of Mexico (GOM), the Office of Fossil Energy’s National Energy Technology Laboratory (NETL) reported Thursday.

The Walker Ridge in the Lower Tertiary of the deepwater Gulf of Mexico (GOM), which may — or may not — hold vast amounts of oil and natural gas reserves, captured the highest bid for a block in the Minerals Management Service’s (MMS) Central GOM sale on Wednesday.

The Senate is expected to begin consideration of the omnibus energy bill early next week, aides to Senate Majority Leader Bill Frist (R-TN) and the Senate Energy and Natural Resources Committee said.

A key ingredient in reformulated gasoline, methyl tertiary butyl ether, or MTBE, may soon be in short supply because of the rising price of natural gas. Friday, independent Valero Refining Corp. said it has cut its MTBE production 7,000 bbl/d from its only production plant because of the high costs.