Marcellus & Utica Shale Story Links: Tue, Apr 9, 2013

The “best of the rest” – stories that caught MDN’s eye that you may be interested in reading:

New York

Deal or No Deal on Natural Gas for New York?
Energy in Depth – NMI
The debate over natural gas development nationwide is all about New York State and the debate in New York State is all about the Natural Resources Defense Council and its goals. Those goals are contrary to the interests of landowners and ordinary New Yorkers.

Ohio

What to Expect in the Release of 2012 Utica Shale Well Results by the Ohio Dept of Natural Resources
Sterne Agee/Akron Beacon Journal
The investment community continues to wait for the Ohio Department of Natural Resources (DNR) to release all Utica Shale wells drilled in Ohio in 2012. We expected a release late last week, but still haven’t received anything. We believe results are likely to be posted on the state’s web site this week.

Trucking Job Fair Shows Growing Importance of Shale in Ohio
Energy in Depth – Ohio
This week, Oilfield Trucking Solutions, an affiliate of Chesapeake Energy Corporation, held a job fair in New Philadelphia in hopes of finding more than 20 qualified workers to drive water trucks in Canton and Wheeling. As many have heard around the Buckeye State, truck drivers are in high demand, and a large part of the 38,000 jobs shale development created in the state last year were in the trucking industry.

Shale Activities Could Replace Former Ohio Steel Plant Site
NGI’s Shale Daily (requires a subscription or free trial for MDN readers to access)
A former steel plant in Steubenville, OH, is being redeveloped into an industrial park, a portion of which state and local officials say will be used to support operations in the Marcellus Shale.

John Kasich says Oklahoma, Texas have “sky high” taxes on oil and gas but are reducing or have no income tax
Cleveland Plain Dealer/PolitiFact
"Right now, Texas doesn’t have an income tax and Oklahoma’s lowering their income tax rates, and guess what their severance tax is? Sky high."

New energy brings new outlook, opportunities to region
CantonRep.com
The gas and oil industry projects to drill 4,000 wells in the Utica shale by 2015, wells that could produce for decades. The main activity so far has been in Carroll County, with business opportunities spilling over into neighboring Stark and Tuscarawas counties.

Pennsylvania

Media leap to assumptions about Marcellus health impacts
Pittsburgh Post-Gazette
The recent release of court documents related to alleged drilling contamination in southwest Pennsylvania is a case study in how false narratives dominate the media, but accuracy and safety are stories apparently too boring to tell.

The Leaking Impoundment That’s Not Leaking
Energy in Depth – NMI
A recent article in the Canon-McMillan Patch suggests a Cecil Township impoundment used to store Marcellus water was leaking, which is not true. What really happened demonstrates industry procedures and state oversight worked exactly as intended in the case of what was a very minor incident.

State [of Pennsylvania] could provide Latins lucrative trade benefits
Pittsburgh Post-Gazette
What does Pennsylvania have to offer Brazil and Chile, nations whose economic rise has drawn numerous U.S. delegations to seek trade and investment at their sprawling urban centers? Through more than a week of meetings, starting today, Gov. Tom Corbett and business leaders hope to convince their South American counterparts that the answer is lengthy and compelling.

Sustainable shale development… hype, hope or hoax? CSSD “standards” reflect chronic transparency problem
Shale Gas Review
We learned last month from the Associated Press that “Energy firms, environmental groups agree on tough new fracking standards.” Specifically, the report by Kevin Begos characterized these standards as a breakthrough, a product of “an unlikely partnership between longtime adversaries” once at odds over assessing merits and risks of shale gas development.

A tale of two industries: Pa. natural gas thriving while subsidized solar struggles
Washington Examiner
Natural gas drilling has earned Pennsylvania more than $400 million over the last two years, Gov. Tom Corbett announced Thursday morning. Revenue from the Marcellus Shale impact fee points to a thriving industry in a state that sits on one of the largest shale gas reserves in the country.

Are drillers divulging too much?
Pittsburgh Business Times
Disclosures have raised questions about intellectual property concerns — are companies, by divulging their frac-fluid formulas, giving away too many trade secrets?

Western Pennsylvania chemical makers work to improve frac-fluid formula for drilling
Pittsburgh Business Times
Frac-fluid design is more an art than a science today, said Dave Grottenthaler, general manager of Kroff Well Services, a company that’s ballooned as part of the fracking boom.

National

Boost Natural Gas Use, ‘Kiss OPEC Goodbye,’ Says Hofmeister
NGI’s Shale Daily (requires a subscription or free trial for MDN readers to access)
Developing domestic gas resources could boost gross domestic product by 5% a year for the next 40 years, creating more jobs and powering the economy, says a former Shell Oil Co. chief. John Hofmeister is a man on a mission.

Sorting through the claims, counterclaims about environmental impact of ‘fracking’
NBC News
It’s difficult to find scientists who have not lined up on one side or another on hydraulic fracking for oil and natural gas. The anti-fracking groups have their scientific talking points, and the pro-fracking groups have their counterclaims.

Higher U.S. Natural Gas Forecasts Coalesce
NGI’s Shale Daily (requires a subscription or free trial for MDN readers to access)
Six energy prognosticators over the past week have raised their outlooks for domestic natural gas prices this year, with one indicating that $4.50/MMBtu this summer is "on the table" based on a colder-than-expected end to winter and slowing production in major onshore basins.

GE purchases Lufkin Industries for $3.3 billion
Bloomberg/Akron Beacon Journal
General Electric Co. is tapping proceeds from the sale of NBC to fund its $3.3 billion purchase of Lufkin Industries Inc. as Chief Executive Officer Jeffrey Immelt takes advantage of an oil-drilling boom. Oil and gas has become GE’s fastest-growing segment with sales since 2009 up 57 percent to $15.2 billion amid a shale-oil boom poised to make the U.S. the world’s largest crude producer. Lufkin makes artificial lift equipment that brings crude and other materials to the surface.

Fracking rush starting in southern Illinois
AP/Akron Beacon Journal
Blessed with natural resources but never enough jobs, southern Illinois counties have begun sampling the fruits of a land rush linked to a debated drilling practice that speculators believe can tap elusive oil and natural gas thousands of feet underground.

The death of peak oil
Econbrowser
"Peak oil is dead," Rob Wile declared last week. Colin Sullivan says it has "gone the way of the Flat Earth Society."

Chesapeake Predicts Utica Shale Production Boost
Energy & Capital
According to Steve Dixon, the newly-named acting CEO of Chesapeake Energy Corp., this year we should see a significant increase in production from the company’s Utica Shale wells thanks to the development of several new production facilities that would drive oil and natural gas production up.

Clean Energy Systems: Nearing The Point Of Inflection?
Seeking Alpha
The combination of high oil prices and lower natural gas prices brought on by the fracking boom has led to various efforts to breach petroleum’s transportation moat. There are various ways of using natural gas as a transportation fuel; for this article, compressed natural gas (CNG) and liquefied natural gas (LNG) are most relevant (although the conversion of natural gas into methanol is also an option).

Climate Fight Should Target Coal, Not Keystone
Bloomberg
Climate activists amassed an impressive army to march on Washington against the Keystone XL pipeline and the dirty oil it would bring from Canada to U.S. refineries and world energy markets. In this fight, however, a relatively small volume of carbon-dioxide emissions is at stake — the Environmental Protection Agency estimates that those from Keystone amount to a mere 0.2 percent of the “carbon budget” that scientists say we need to shrink in order to avoid catastrophic warming.

International

Foreign Investors Back US Shale Boom, Ignore Mexico
The American Interest
America’s shale revolution is more global than you think. Twenty percent of investments in American shale energy, totaling more than $26 billion, came from joint ventures with foreign companies.

How the U.S. Blew Up the Global Energy Market
The Fiscal Times
Late last month, Alexey Miller, CEO of the Russian energy giant Gazprom, dismissed the energy boom occurring in the U.S. right now as a “soap bubble [that] will burst soon” – and said the United States was “not a competitor” to Gazprom.

US, Russia vie for largest natural gas reserves
NBC News
The United States, currently one of the world’s largest sources of natural gas, may find itself fending off increasingly stiff competition in the resource’s development, as the move to tap natural gas supplies goes global.