Doug Hock, spokesman for Encana Oil and Gas, on Tuesday said the company plans to spend up to $130 million on operations in the Piceance Basin in 2010.

The company also has started work on a new office building in Parachute.

Much of the confidence behind those plans, Hock said, comes from the increasing value of what are known as “natural gas liquids,” or NGLs.

Natural gas liquids are found in the same deposits where oil and gas are located, said Hock.

“They are heavier than methane molecules and come out of the well as liquid, rather than gas. They include ethane, propane, butanes and pentanes,” he said.

For the rest of the story visit, Encana shifting focus to natural gas liquids

The 54-13 vote Friday by lawmakers moves forward the industry-sponsored bill that gives only the state the power to regulate new oil and gas production.

Recent discoveries in western Idaho have local residents and governments near reserves concerned about the industry’s potential expansion. Officials in Washington County began crafting their own rules to regulate the industry in response.

The Spokesman-Review reports that Lava Hot Springs Rep. Ken Andrus favors the measure. He says regulation and responsibility over the resource, which has been a boon to other states, belongs with the state.

For the rest of the story visit, Bill gives state authority over oil and gas drilling

McKinley, on Monday toured the 268-acre farm of Cameron residents Philip and Deborah Kittle. Drilling has yet to begin on their property, but a 300-foot by 300-foot pad on which wells will be drilled is in place.

“We are proponents of the oil and gas industry, but we want it done right,” Deborah Kittle told McKinley. “We may have signed that lease, but at the end of the day, it’s still our property.”

The Kittles said Chevron Corp. now holds the lease they originally signed with Tri-Energy Holdings. Tri-Energy assigned their lease to AB Resources, and Chevron last year took over the Marshall and Ohio County operations from AB Resources.

“I do believe Chevron is going to do it and do it right,” said Philip Kittle.

Deborah Kittle said she keeps an active eye on the workers when they are doing anything on her land. Even though actual drilling has yet to commence, she said construction of the road leading to the well pad and the well pad itself are major projects in their own right.

For the rest of the story visit, Drilling Should Be by the Book, McKinley Says

Soon after thousands of additional acres were opened up, another company, Chesapeake, decided to come into the play and drill a little farther out from the known production. Chesapeake, which usually is a front runner in shale plays but came to the Bakken very late in the game, decided to try for economic Three Forks production South of Dickinson. Unfortunately, early reports are that most of these wildcats were not successful and have been plugged. There have even been reports that Chesapeake sent letters to mineral owners in the area saying they did not intend to honor their leases.

On the Southern end, it appears the edges of economic production from the Bakken and Three Forks formations have been found. This is not to say that new technology will not be able to exploit oil from this area in the future or that there are no other formations able to produce horizontal oil. For instance, the Tyler formation’s horizontal potential is only starting to be developed in this same area.

For the rest of the story visit, The Bakken Oil Field: Have The Edges Been Found?

But the Diehls are divided over the fate of their property — like thousands of others along the Pennsylvania border, where rich natural gas deposits underlie forests, pastures and towns. As New York prepares to lift a moratorium on new permits for hydraulic fracturing — which carries environmental risks — landowners are debating whether to lease mineral rights to extraction companies.

Pete, 67, opposes leasing his land and the property the brothers jointly own. He worries that he would lose control over his pastures to a big corporation and that the drilling process could ruin the water.

“Once you lease the land, they can do what they want on it. They can drill wherever they want,” he said. “It’s about the future. It’s the landscape. It’s the Catskills.”

Jack, 61, favors leasing, convinced that a tough contract could protect the water while delivering thousands of dollars in royalties to keep the family’s farms afloat in these difficult economic times.

For the rest of the story visit, Fracking debate divides New York landowners

Louis Chodkiewicz of Broadview Heights, who fought for two years and endured a heart attack in the process, said a wellhead now sits 175 feet from his property. There are four others like it within 500 feet, owned by other companies.

Ohio is one of 38 states in the country that provides gas and oil companies with a loophole to obtain property and mineral rights, known as mandatory pooling.

“How can the state of Ohio make me a partner with a company I want nothing to do with? It’s not a choice, it’s an ultimatum: ‘Sign it or we take it,’” he said.

According to Ohio law in effect since 1965, a mandatory pooling order can be applied for if a tract of land is of insufficient size or shape for drilling a well and the “landowner has been unable to form a drilling unit on a just and equitable basis.”

Tom Stewart of the Ohio Oil and Gas Association said “over-drilling became a problem in the 1960s with landowners drilling wells close to property lines in efforts to draw minerals from their neighbors properties.

For the rest of the story visit, State law allows drilling without consent

Ultra, a Texas-based oil company, plans an intensive drilling operation with 2,500 oil and gas leases in the county. The company owns 18,000 acres of the Banning Lewis Ranch in Colorado Springs. Company officials hope to extract oil from Niobrara shale that is about 5,000 feet in the ground.

Meanwhile, gasoline prices are soaring and threatening to reach record highs of $4.25 a gallon in April on the heels of President Barack Obama’s refusal to allow a major oil pipeline from Canada through the United States.

High gas prices could wipe out the slow and delicate recovery Americans are beginning to notice by simply consuming discretionary income and by increasing prices on production and transportation of nearly all goods and services. Companies paying more for fuel have less money with which to expand and create jobs. Employees spending more on their commutes to and from work have less money to spend on goods, services, recreation and summer vacations. Stores must charge more for products when they cost more to ship. It is easy to see the many ways that high fuel prices ripple through our economy and depress it.

If oil exploration is wildly successful in El Paso County, it will create jobs and tax revenues that can be used to improve local schools and to pay down government debts.

For the rest of the story visit, Our View: Wish them well as they begin to drill

Denver-based Inflection Energy, one of the most active energy companies in the Southern Tier, is facing a federal lawsuit filed by 18 landowners, representing about 1,200 acres, whose leases were forcibly extended through “force majeure” claims.

Many of the landowners are locked into leases that pay as low as $2 per acre per year, but aren’t seeking monetary compensation, according to Robert Jones, an attorney for Binghamton-based Coughlin & Gerhart.

“All they’re looking for at this point is to get released from the current leases that they believe are expired,” Jones said.

Force majeure clauses, included in most oil and gas leases, allow a company to extend the length of the lease in the case of an unforeseen event that hinders the terms of the contract.

Several other companies besides Inflection — including XTO Energy Corp., Norse Energy Corp. and Chesapeake Energy — have invoked force majeure clauses, claiming New York state’s ongoing hold on permits for high-volume hydraulic fracturing falls into that category.

For the rest of the story visit, Tioga gas drilling lawsuit could set precedent

“We’re just beginning, really, to find out what comes from a gas drilling site like this,” said Dr. Michael McCawley, a professor in the Department of Community Medicine. “We don’t really know what the levels are or if, in fact, the levels are high enough to cause any concern anywhere around.”

The new monitors measure the levels of dust, other particulates, and gases like methane which have been linked to cancer and respiratory problems.

“Later on, looking down the line at health effects, we don’t want to be behind the curve in knowing what’s happening,” McCawley said.

The monitors are portable and designed to be set up in a ring around drilling site to see what just what is coming from the site and what isn’t.

“Truck traffic from an interstate for example could put up the same volatile organic compounds that you might see from a well site. So you want to be able to distinguish what’s coming onto the site versus what’s leaving it.

McCawley’s team and the DOE will test the system at a drilling site in Washington, Pa. He hopes to see the system in action in West Virginia this year and plans to publish the blueprints so regulators, gas companies, or even community members could build one.

For the rest of the story visit, WVU Develops Marcellus Shale Air Monitoring System

Now comes word that although coal shipments by rail are down as utilities shift to burning natural gas to generate electricity, shipments of sand used to fracture shale formations are up.

“Moving sand, pipe and other drilling equipment gives carriers such as CSX, the largest U.S. eastern railroad, new cargo as coal customers scale back,” Bloomberg News noted on Thursday.

Bloomberg quoted CSX Chief Executive Officer Michael Ward as saying that moving fracking sand into the Marcellus Shale region (which underlies much of West Virginia) is “a great growth opportunity for us.”

According to Bloomberg, CSX’s fracking-sand carloads grew by more than 40 percent to more than 12,000 in 2011.

Bloomberg said that although Norfolk Southern does not provide data for sand shipments, the railroad’s total carloads for the Marcellus Shale region rose 67 percent to 40,000 last year, compared to 2010.

For the rest of the story visit, Marcellus shale economic engine keeps on rolling