Shale Gas News Radio – Feb 14, 2015 [Audio]
Every Saturday the one-hour Shale Gas News show airs on Scranton, PA’s 94.3 FM “The Talker” radio station. The show is co-hosted by Kevin Lynn of Linde Corporation and Bill desRosiers from Cabot Oil & Gas. MDN brings you the latest program show notes and recordings for Shale Gas News each week (well worth your time to listen). Here’s the latest program, recorded on Saturday, Feb 14…
The Shale Gas News is typically broadcast live and this past Saturday’s program, the podcast of which is available here, covered the following new territory (see news excerpts below) and, among many more topics, included interviews with Mike Narcavage of Southwestern Energy (SWN) and Matt Henderson of Inflection Energy:
- Debate swirls around a proposed natural gas extraction tax in Pennsylvania with money hungry politicos from both sides of the aisle in Delaware County salivating over the prospect of stealing local impact fees from heretofore poor rural counties to pay for public employee pensions in their far wealthier communities.
- Falling oil prices can’t slow growth of compressed natural gas. A 50% drop in the price of crude oil since last summer hasn’t slowed the move by companies with diesel-powered vehicles to shift their fleets to compressed natural gas (see picture from story above).
- Shale gas slowdowns due to low prices is impacting US manufacturing boom. The France-based Vallourec Star announces it will idle its new, $1 billion steel mill in Youngstown for three weeks, citing slackening demand for the steel tube it makes for drillers. Great time to impose a severance tax, huh?
- New research: A USGS in-depth study of fracking from 1947-2010 documents the expanded use of horizontal/directional drilling from 6% of new hydraulically fractured wells drilled in the US in 2000 to 42% of new wells drilled in 2010.
- EIA tracking tool shows light-sweet crude oil imports to Gulf Coast virtually eliminated. Refineries had imported as much as 1.3 million barrels per day (bbl/d) of light-sweet crude oil. Since September 2012, imports to the Gulf Coast have regularly been less than 200,000 bbl/d.
- Tunkhannock may get a gas connection by next year. Under a five-year pilot program UGI is investing $75 million to reach roughly 10,000 customers.
- Southwestern Energy, a natural gas drilling company, recently donated $5,000 to the welding programat the Susquehanna County Career and Technology Center.