Today

Producing natural gas in North America today isn’t a particularly lucrative venture, but for proponents of exporting liquefied natural gas (LNG), particularly from Western Canada, the times couldn’t be better.

ONEOK Partners LP has placed into service its 100 MMcf/d gas processing facility in eastern McKenzie County in North Dakota. The Garden Creek Plant is serving producers in the Bakken Shale region.

Land that Anadarko Petroleum Corp. has long controlled in northern Colorado in the Wattenberg Field holds a huge liquids-rich resource potential of 500 million to 1.5 billion boe net, executives disclosed this week. Separately, Noble Energy Inc., which controls 400,000 net acres in the play, said Tuesday it has identified 1.3 billion boe of net risked resources with the potential for even more.

The world shale gas industry has undergone big changes industrywide in just a year’s time and it still faces a “period of great uncertainty and policy challenges,” an energy expert said Tuesday.

In today’s uncertain economic and public policy environment, senior executives are leery of Wall Street’s ready appetite for mergers and acquisitions (M&A), according to a panel of three executives discussing growing rate base Tuesday at the Bank of America Merrill Lynch Power and Gas Leaders Conference in New York City.

In today’s safety-sensitive time for the North American natural gas pipeline industry, a small measure of hope was raised Monday by researchers at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) for a new tool to help detect pipeline problems before they arise. It involves the application of an existing MIT computer model that tests automobile components for crashworthiness.

Louisiana parishes overlying the Haynesville Shale “are awash in money;” others, not so much, an economist told NGI’s Shale Daily. As producers set their sights on more lucrative shale plays — the Marcellus and Eagle Ford, for instance — beneficiaries of the North Louisiana shale boom would be wise not to build the shale revenue into their budgets, he said.

The unfolding story of Lower 48 shale gas supply and the buildout of the nation’s natural gas pipeline grid have done a lot to beat down gas prices and minimize volatility. So much so that one academic suggests in a new paper that some utilities and their regulators are out of step with the latest in price-risk hedging strategies.

The California Public Utilities Commission (CPUC) last week unanimously (5-0) ordered Pacific Gas and Electric Co. (PG&E) to face a show-cause hearing today (March 28) over what the regulators unequivocally have determined is the utility’s lack of compliance in ongoing state and federal investigations of the Sept. 9 natural gas transmission pipeline rupture in San Bruno, CA. Separately, PG&E and the CPUC staff have worked out a preliminary stipulated resolution to correct the situation on an accelerated basis.