Worst

Colorado has an opportunity to show the nation how the energy industry, regulators and environmental groups can work together, but the state’s administration is “exploiting our worst fears instead of providing leadership to bring us together,” a Denver-based natural resources attorney charged last week.

Colorado has an opportunity to show the nation how the energy industry, regulators and environmental groups can work together, but the state’s administration is “exploiting our worst fears instead of providing leadership to bring us together,” a Denver-based natural resources attorney charged Wednesday.

The Arkoma Basin has become a “tale of two shales” — it’s not quite the best of times yet, but it’s certainly not the worst. By 2010, natural gas volumes from the Fayetteville and Woodford shales may approach 970 MMcfe/d, a significant jump from this year’s expectation of 469 MMcfe/d.

The Arkoma Basin has become a “tale of two shales” — it’s not quite the best of times yet, but it’s certainly not the worst. By 2010, natural gas volumes from the Fayetteville and Woodford shales may approach 970 MMcfe/d, a significant jump from this year’s expectation of 469 MMcfe/d.

With the worst of the current cold spell receding to past tense in northern market areas and the South starting to return to more seasonal temperatures for the first half of April, most of Tuesday’s market was mixed and in the vicinity of flat in many cases. Moderate gains appeared to slightly outweigh small losses.

The omission of price thresholds in the 1998 and 1999 deepwater Gulf of Mexico oil and natural gas leases is “an example of bureaucratic bungling” at its worst, and the failure by Minerals Management Service (MMS) employees to report the oversight to superiors when they first detected it in 2000 stems from a “culture of irresponsibility” that pervades the Interior Department agency, Interior Inspector General Early Devaney told a House Government Reform subcommittee last Wednesday.

While Hurricane Katrina was one of the most destructive natural gas disasters to strike the United States, it did not cause the worst-case type of scenarios with respect to natural gas production, according to FERC’s Office of Market Oversight and Investigations (OMOI).

Noting that this winter will end up being the second worst season in the Pacific Northwest in a series of six straight with below-normal water levels, a group of public- and private-sector energy providers in Portland, OR, Thursday collectively urged retail power customers throughout the region to conserve electricity and shift their use to nonpeak demand times this spring and summer.

Although some analysts believe the gas industry still hasn’t seen the worst of the demand destruction due to high gas prices, consultants at Energy and Environmental Analysis Inc. (EEA) predict that gas consumption from the industrial sector will remain flat at current levels “for the foreseeable future.”