New Report Says Canadian Utica Shale Key to Lower Emissions Future
Not everyone in Canada is a liberal loon just like not everyone in New York State is a liberal loon. Case in point: the Montreal Economic Institute (MEI), an independent public policy think tank, has just published a report pointing out the fallacy of Quebec believing it can electrify all of its energy supplies without using natural gas. In particular, the paper says Quebec’s Utica Shale layer can and should play a key role in Quebec’s so-called all-electric future.
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Enverus (formerly Drillinginfo) is a leading data, software and insights company that provides information to upstream, midstream, and downstream companies. Enverus experts have just published an “Oil and Gas Fundamentals Update” featuring the impacts of COVID-19. VP of Strategic Analytics for Enverus, Bernadette Johnson, says “there will still be more painful announcements, but we are seeing the bottom” of the current oil and gas price crash. It will be painful and slow, but we now begin to crawl back up out of the hole we are in.
Everyone is still trying to get their heads around what has and is happening to the economies and energy markets around the world, suffering huge blows from being shut down due to the COVID-19 coronavirus pandemic. Everyone has their own models and predictions. The latest is the International Energy Agency which has just published its World Energy Review–an analysis of how the virus pandemic is likely to affect world energy markets based on what has happened over the past 100 days.
A partnership between Penn State EMS Energy Institute researchers and a Pittsburgh-based start-up company may hold the answer to reducing so-called greenhouse gas emissions while also paving the way to disrupt the chemical and material industries. The collaboration has resulted in several research projects that aim to “reinvent” both coal and natural gas as clean, cost-effective sources of fuels and high-performance materials.
Simon-Kucher & Partners, a global strategy and marketing consulting firm along with Rice University surveyed 195 oil and gas industry experts from around the world. They published their findings in a report titled “2020 Oil & Gas Crisis Study.” The upshot, the sentiment, is that the current crisis faced by oil companies is largely homegrown. We did it to ourselves.
The number crunchers at our favorite government agency, the U.S. Energy Information Administration (EIA), have analyzed recent additions to the national electric grid–the new power generating plants that have been added. As you know, electricity can be generated by coal, natural gas, water (hydro), nuclear and yes, so-called renewables. At first blush, the report issued by EIA yesterday looks to be a win for renewables. In 2019 onshore wind added 9,100 megawatts of new electricity and solar added 5,300 MW of new electricity (combined total of 14,400). In 2019 natural gas added 8,300 MW of new electricity to the grid. Yet when you look at the bigger picture, how much electricity is generated by any given single source, natgas produces far more electricity than any other source.
Some exciting news is chronicled in a recent post by our favorite government agency, the U.S. Energy Information Administration (EIA). Last year, in 2019, the United States exported more energy (oil, natural gas, coal, and petroleum products) than it imported. That’s the first time we’ve exported more than imported in 67 years!
In late March we told you about the biggest one-week drop in U.S. rig counts in the past four years when the rig count dropped by 47 in a single week (see 
Economists at consulting powerhouse The Brattle Group have released an assessment/report on the impacts through early April 2020 of COVID-19 on the electric and natural gas industries. The report (full copy below) summarizes recent developments in energy commodity spot and forward pricing, electricity demand, and financial markets, and speculates on what will happen if the pandemic persists. One of the surprising findings (for us) is that weather is having far more effect on keeping natgas prices low than COVID-19. There’s plenty of charts and analysis–really good stuff to ponder. Battle Group has a lot of smart people thinking about this stuff.
We’ve been dreading this month’s edition of normally our favorite report, the U.S. Energy Information Administration’s (EIA) Drilling Productivity Report (DPR). The DPR estimates how much oil and natural gas each of the country’s seven largest shale plays produced in the previous (current) month, and how much each will produce in the coming (next) month. The past few months have seen a big decline in Marcellus/Utica gas production, more than half a Bcf/d (see 
We spotted a new scientific study published in an upcoming edition of the journal Water Research. The study is called: “Sulfate precipitation in produced water from Marcellus Shale for the control of naturally occurring radioactive material.” Researchers from the University of Pittsburgh have found a way to strip out radioactivity from produced water coming from Marcellus wells so the water can be boiled to produce clean water and usable minerals/salts.
Enverus, a leading oil and gas SaaS and data analytics company, has just released its latest FundamentalEdge report called, “
After we picked ourselves up off the floor from laughing so hard, it dawned on us the far-left radicals at THE Delaware Riverkeeper, Clean Air Council and PennFuture have done both the PennEast Pipeline and Adelphia Gateway pipeline projects a HUGE beneficial service. Those three nutty groups commissioned and have just released a new “study” (copy below) that uses data to show PennEast and Adelphia together, WHEN (not if) they get built, will mean that PA drillers have to drill and connect another 1,913 to 3,061 new shale wells to feed them. Well duuuh! Of course it means that!! And that’s a GREAT thing for all of PA. More economic stimulus. More jobs. More tax revenues flowing to local municipalities. (Do these groups know they’ve just handed us a new argument in favor of these pipelines?)
We spotted an interesting article appearing in the American Oil & Gas Reporter about results from using tiny ceramic beads as a proppant in oil and gas wells in several shale plays. Typically sand is used as a proppant to “prop open” tiny fractures to allow oil and gas to escape from shale rock. Sometimes ceramic beads are used. The article is based on a paper delivered at the Society of Petroleum Engineers’ Hydraulic Fracturing Technical Conference & Exhibition, held Feb. 4-6 in The Woodlands, Texas. Of particular interest to us are the findings for the Utica and Marcellus. The “micropropped” Utica wells showed a marked increase in oil production, while no such increase in production happened in micropropped Marcellus wells.
What happens when an oil driller has a well or two or dozen where they get great oil production, but there are no pipelines connected to cart away the associated natural gas that comes out of the borehole along with the oil? There are only a couple of options–venting (releasing methane into the air) and flaring (burning the methane, turning it into carbon dioxide). There are a number of innovative companies that have a new solution: Go ahead and burn the methane, but burn it to produce electricity, and use the electricity (at the well site) to power computers. The computers are connected to a network of other computers and form a sort of supercomputer. Crusoe Energy Systems is one of those innovative companies, now using their distributed computing systems at oil wells to work on computations aimed at finding a vaccine for the COVID-19 coronavirus.