Time

The city council in Youngstown, OH, voted 5-2 Wednesday in favor of an ordinance that could open city-owned land to oil and natural gas drilling.

President Obama and Republican presidential nominee Mitt Romney wasted little time in clashing over energy issues in the second presidential debate Tuesday, with the Obama administration’s record on oil and natural gas permitting on public lands triggering the most fireworks.

Murphy Oil Corp.’s plans to spin off its downstream operations will allow it to focus more time and money on exploration and production (E&P) opportunities, including a big leasehold in the Eagle Ford Shale, executives said Tuesday.

Inflated by production from the nation’s burgeoning shale plays, total gross withdrawals of domestic natural gas jumped to 28.58 Tcf in 2011, a 6.5% increase from 26.84 Tcf in 2010, and are on pace to easily surpass those numbers again this year, according to the U.S. Energy Information Administration’s Monthly Energy Review for September.

For the first time in 22 years a surviving relic of Canadian energy trade regulation — volume control on natural gas and oil exports — has popped up on the national agenda for review and change. The renewed interest comes when British Columbia is poised to become the departure point for tankers bound for Asian markets with liquefied Canadian gas.

For the first time in 22 years a surviving relic of Canadian energy trade regulation — volume control on natural gas and oil exports — has popped up on the national agenda for review and change. The renewed interest comes when British Columbia is poised to become the departure point for tankers bound for Asian markets with liquefied Canadian gas.

The Environmental Working Group (EWG) this week sued New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo’s administration to obtain documents that would show how the state has drafted its plan to permit high-volume hydraulic fracturing (fracking) and horizontal drilling for unconventional natural gas.

Saying it is “a great time to be a Pennsylvanian,” Gov. Tom Corbett thanked the oil and natural gas industry for bringing thousands of jobs to his state and predicted an even brighter future as he kicked off the Marcellus Shale Coalition’s Shale Gas Insight 2012 Conference in Philadelphia on Thursday.

Naturally occurring methane in New York water wells could serve as a baseline to measure the quality of the water supply if and when natural gas drilling is expanded and high-volume hydraulic fracturing (fracking) is allowed, the U.S. Geological Survey (USGS) said in a new report. New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo is expected to announce any day a decision about whether to allow more gas drilling to proceed.