E&P

Marathon Oil Corp.’s U.S. resource plays can hold their own in a low-price environment, and the company’s U.S. drilling program is expected to proceed essentially unchanged from plan, executives said Tuesday.

Work is underway at the former Ormet Corp. aluminum smelting plant straddling Ohio and West Virginia to transform the 1,700 acre site into a large-scale port and central service terminal for the oil and gas industry operating in the region.

Chevron Corp.’s Permian Basin, and specifically the Midland and Delaware play, helped increase North American shale and tight resources production year/year by 23,000 b/d in the third quarter.

The United States produced, consumed and delivered for consumption record levels of natural gas in 2013, and imports fell for the sixth consecutive year, according to an annualreport by the U.S. Energy Information Administration (EIA).

The three owners of the Capline crude oil pipeline system said they will conduct a study to determine potential future operations, as well as a possible connection to the proposed Diamond Pipeline.

ConocoPhillips, the largest independent in the United States, was the first on Thursday to announce plans to reduce capital spending to cope with the recent downturn in oil prices. Some drilling cutbacks will be made, but not within two of its best rate-of-return plays, the Eagle Ford and Bakken shales.

Shippers stepped up for 3.25 Bcf/d of pipeline capacity from the Marcellus and Utica shales to markets in the Midwest, Great Lakes and Gulf Coast on Energy Transfer Partners LP’s (ETP) ET Rover project. The binding commitments are for 15- and 20-year fee-based contracts.

Lower prices for crude oil aren’t doing any favors for Enterprise Products Partners LP’s proposed crude pipeline from North Dakota to the Cushing, OK, hub, executives admitted Thursday. But U.S. producers have staying power even at lower oil prices because the country “…is in the middle of a production revolution,” they said.

Polls show Pennsylvania’s Republican Gov.Tom Corbett narrowing the double-digit lead that Democratic challenger Tom Wolf has enjoyed for much of the campaign. The election has high stakes for the oil and gas industry as Wolf has pushed a severance tax and made energy reform a mainstay of his campaign.