Author Archives: EnergyWire

Utica shale gets infrastructure boost with new processing plant

Posted on by
(Photo by Penn State via Creative Commons)

(Photo by Penn State via Creative Commons)

©2013 E&E Publishing, LLC
Republished with permission

By Peter Behr

Another link in an industrial chain Ohio hopes to see growing around the Utica Shale play was added Tuesday with the opening of a factory in Youngstown that builds natural gas processing equipment.

Houston-based Exterran Holdings Inc. said it built the 65,000-square-foot plant in northeast Ohio to be close to the Appalachian shale gas and oil plays. It has been supplying the region’s gas and oil operators from its Texas and Oklahoma plants.

“Our customers are actively participating in the development and production of oil and gas in this region, including the Marcellus and Utica shale plays, making this a natural geographic fit for us,” said Exterran President and CEO Brad Childers. The $13 million plant will ship its first completed units in about three weeks and will have 100 employees at full capacity, the company said. →

Coal makes a comeback in Europe as conventional gas dries up

Posted on by
Open pit coal mining in Germany. (Photo by Rene Schwietzke via Creative Commons)

Open pit coal mining in Germany. (Photo by Rene Schwietzke via Creative Commons)

©2013 E&E Publishing, LLC
Republished with permission

By Arthur Max

Europe’s declining competitiveness with U.S. industry has its leaders worried, but they admit having no hope of matching the shale revolution that is powering a revival of manufacturing across the Atlantic.

For Europe to remain in the game, energy taxes must be held in check and no new taxes levied, said the European Union’s energy commissioner, Gunther Oettinger.

Instead, Europe must use its energy more efficiently and the European Union’s 27 member countries should open their energy markets to cross-border competition, Oettinger said at a news conference last week in Brussels.

With its conventional gas fields nearly depleted and gas prices four times higher than in the United States, Europe would like to develop a thriving shale gas industry, but that seems unlikely in the near term. →

Bakken’s top producer wants to snuff out natural gas flaring

Posted on by
(Photo by Craig Hennecke via Creative Commons)

(Photo by Craig Hennecke via Creative Commons)

©2013 E&E Publishing, LLC
Republished with permission

By Saqib Rahim

Continental Resources Inc., the top producer in the Bakken Shale, plans to reduce natural gas flaring from its well sites to “as close to zero percent flaring as possible,” the company said Thursday.

That announcement may have been lost behind the company’s towering profit numbers; Continental reported net income of $739 million for 2012, a 72 percent gain versus 2011.

But buried in its annual report, Continental said it has halved its 2011 rate of flaring, a common practice in the Bakken Shale that has lit up environmentalists’ radar.

Continental joins other Bakken operators that say they are getting a handle on flaring and can drive it toward the zero mark in the coming years. →

In Ohio, Utica Shale rig counts may be skewed to favor oil

Posted on by

The most recent map of drilling rigs in Ohio’s Utica Shale play. Triangles designate “oil” rigs at work; circles are “gas” rigs. Map courtesy of the Energy Information Administration, from Baker Hughes rig count data.

©2012 E&E Publishing, LLC
Republished with permission

By Peter Behr

Have prospectors struck oil in Ohio? Again?

That’s certainly what one might think after reading the latest Energy Information Administration report on drilling in the state.

Drawing on the widely read reports on drilling rig activity published by Baker Hughes Inc., EIA said in a “Today in Energy” mini-report last week that there were twice as many active rigs in Ohio’s Utica oil and gas play at the end of October than a year ago. And the big difference was oil exploration.

“The growth in active oil-directed rigs has more than offset the declines in active gas-directed rigs. According to Baker Hughes, about 86 percent, or 24 out of 28 active rigs in the Utica play, were directed toward drilling for shale oil,” EIA said. A year ago, 15 percent were looking for shale oil in the state.

That is a head-scratcher for Ohio’s reborn energy sector. The mother lode in eastern Ohio is believed to be natural gas of the “wet” kind, in which methane pipeline gas is spiked with valuable natural gas liquids — ethane, propane and butane. →

Ohio city votes to block wastewater injection wells

Posted on by

©2012 E&E Publishing, LLC
Republished with permission

By Ellen M. Gillmer

Voters in Mansfield, Ohio, sent a clear message Tuesday that oil and gas wastewater is not welcome in their city.

More than 60 percent voted in favor of an “environmental bill of rights” that would essentially give the city license to ban wastewater injection wells — scattered across the Ohio landscape — on grounds that the operations threaten community rights to clean air and water.
→

Data-heavy project aims to move methane emissions research beyond ‘he said, she said’

Posted on by

A natural gas well near Hamilton, Pennsylvania. (Photo by Andy Arthur via Creative Commons)

©2012 E&E Publishing, LLC
Republished with permission

By Gayathri Vaidyanathan and Saqib Rahim

A team of academics, natural gas companies and environmentalists is hoping to pull a crucial environmental issue from the jaws of polarization and controversy — and start moving it into the realm of accepted reality.

Information wars have flared up around the question of how much methane leaks during hydraulic fracturing. Industry has protested against estimates by federal agencies, leading to a swirl of reports from industry and academia that tell contradictory stories about the problem.

According to the reports, methane either leaks in such high volumes that it demolishes the environmental value of natural gas or is generally controlled by industry and poses no large threat. →

Authors of model fracking regulation find it’s lonely in the middle

Posted on by

A drilling rig in Butler County, Pennsylvania. (Photo by WCN 24/7 via Creative Commons)

©2012 E&E Publishing, LLC
Republished with permission

By Peter Behr

Second in a three-part series. See part one here.

For more than two years, the Environmental Defense Fund has been seeking to line up state regulators and energy companies behind a model regulatory framework for shale gas and oil development that protects underground drinking water supplies and public health.

The project is still a draft. EDF senior policy adviser Scott Anderson says the organization hopes to release the model rules for well construction and fracking by the end of the year.

But EDF’s search for regulatory consensus has pulled it into scarred political terrain, where some environmental groups oppose hydraulic fracturing outright and many industry and state officials challenge any moves to standardize regulation and oversight of a game-changing energy frontier. →

Safety of shale gas wells up to states — and ‘the cement job’

Posted on by

(Photo by Justin Woolford via Creative Commons)

©2012 E&E Publishing, LLC
Republished with permission

By Peter Behr

First in a three-part series.

One Achilles’ heel of the shale gas boom is the potential failure of a vital well construction operation known simply as “the cement job.”

Every state with oil and gas operations requires drillers to pump cement into the spaces between the well hole and the outside of the steel pipe casing at a number of critical points hundreds of feet down. The cement sheaths are installed in order to form impenetrable barriers blocking methane, brackish water or drilling chemicals from migrating up the space around the drill pipe to contaminate drinking water aquifers higher up.

“The key to well integrity is a good cement job,” said Stephanie Meadows, a senior policy adviser at the American Petroleum Institute, which has developed a detailed “best practices” manual for the complex operation. →

Could oil recovery create a market for carbon capture?

Posted on by

(Photo by Shell via Creative Commons)

©2012 E&E Publishing, LLC
Republished with permission

By Saqib Rahim

A key carbon-cutting technology may have met its savior: domestic oil drilling.

Last week, senators released a bill that would sweeten the incentive to capture carbon dioxide from smokestacks, as long as the gas is stuffed underground to produce oil.

Supporters of the bill believe it could achieve something else, too: a new lease on life for carbon capture and sequestration, or CCS.

That technology, which many consider essential to containing climate change, has struggled to lower its costs and gain wide adoption. Now some policymakers, environmentalists and energy producers think CCS could piggyback on the allure of oil production. →

Fleets could put natural gas cars into the fast lane, automakers say

Posted on by

A UPS delivery truck fuels up with compressed natural gas. (Photo via NREL)

©2012 E&E Publishing, LLC
Reposted with permission

By Saqib Rahim

STATE COLLEGE, Pa. — Automakers see a rare opportunity for natural gas vehicles to break into the market, but they continue to see the biggest opening in trucks and buses, not passenger cars.

For these cars, the engineering and infrastructure challenges remain too daunting, auto executives said at a conference here last week.

But for fleets, they said, cheap shale gas has strongly abetted the business case for using natural gas.

“The smaller the vehicle, the more electric powertrains make sense. And the larger the vehicle, the more you get toward CNG [compressed natural gas] or biodiesel,” said Jon Coleman, fleet sustainability and technology manager at Ford Motor Co. “And the reason is that whatever you get the vehicle for, it has do to what you intend it to do.” →