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Forced back into action following the Thursday Independence Day Holiday, physical gas traders in quiet trading Friday for weekend and Monday delivery managed to push most price point averages higher by a few cents, except for in the Northeast and California. Coming off dollar-plus losses on Wednesday, a number of Marcellus Shale-related points reversed course Friday to gain 80 cents or more. California was the only area in the red, with multiple points dropping a nickel to 15 cents.

Chesapeake Energy Corp., the mega-operator that Aubrey McClendon built shale-by-shale, is being repurposed brick-by-brick as the company transitions from risky exploration to steady production.

Sales competition is undermining international prices for liquefied natural gas (LNG), according to ExxonMobil Corp.’s export terminal proposal for the northern Pacific Coast of British Columbia (BC). The supermajor and Canadian affiliate Imperial Oil Ltd. noted the competition in a filing with the National Energy Board (NEB) to build terminal that could export as much as 30 million metric tons a year (mmty) to overseas markets.

Move over Florida Gas Transmission (FGT), Southern Natural Gas, Gulfstream Natural Gas System LLC and Cypress Pipeline because Spectra Energy Corp. wants to build a 465-mile interstate natural gas pipeline into the Sunshine State.

Pacific NorthWest LNG has applied to the National Energy Board (NEB) for a license to export up to 19.68 million tonnes (mmty) of liquefied natural gas (LNG) per year for 25 years beginning in 2019 from its proposed facility in Port Edward, British Columbia (BC), not far from nine other proposed LNG projects centered on Prince Rupert, BC.

The Alberta government has stepped forward as a customer for the planned conversion of one large pipe of the six parallel pipes that comprise TransCanada Corp.’s natural gas Mainline, which has suffered severely declining natural gas transport volumes, to oil service (see Daily GPI, April 29).

Three years after the Macondo well blowout and resulting drilling moratorium, oil and gas exploration has been slowly but surely returning to the Gulf of Mexico (GOM). On Wednesday Royal Dutch Shell plc reported a successful exploratory well at Vicksburg in the deepwater GOM.

Backed by Germany’s government, three global firms have begun a three-year project that will attempt to make the greenhouse gas carbon dioxide (CO2) into a useful component of various industrial processes, starting with abundant natural gas supplies as a feedstock.

Former FBI Director Louis Freeh was appointed Tuesday as a special master to investigate apparent misconduct by one of the lawyers who helped manage BP plc’s $7.8 billion settlement fund with Gulf Coast plaintiffs over the deepwater Macondo well blowout in April 2010.