Shell CEO @ LNG18: Working Hard to Lower LNG Costs
In April 2015 when supermajor Royal Dutch Shell announced it wanted to buy out BG and merge the two companies–the biggest such merger since Exxon merged with Mobil–we told you the buyout/merger was all about LNG (see LNG Love Story: Shell Makes Play to Buy BG in $69.7B Megamerger). In February, Shell consummated the deal with BG (see Shell & BG One Company After Today, Shell Ponies Up $14.4B Cash). Earlier today Shell CEO Ben van Beurden took the stage at the LNG18 conference in Perth, Australia. van Beurden’s talk was, as you can imagine, about LNG–liquefied natural gas–and how Shell is working to lower costs in engineering and construction of LNG facilities. That is, van Beurden confirmed what everyone already knew: LNG is the future of Shell…
Read More “Shell CEO @ LNG18: Working Hard to Lower LNG Costs”
We don’t have to tell you it’s bad out there in the oil and gas patch. Hundreds of thousands of jobs have disappeared in the last year or so. Many workers are on unemployment. Some have transitioned to other jobs within the oil and gas industry–many to other industries completely. But there’s one guy–a former roughneck–who has transitioned to a job we never imagined. He creates Art Deco pieces by welding old machinery and leftover whatever together–into things like tables. Apparently he makes enough money from it to pay the bills, including the salary of one employee. He does admit, however, that he’s biding his time until the o&g industry turns around again. Meet a unique 50-something guy in Ohio who went from roughneck to artist…
CPA/consulting firm HBK (Hill, Barth & King) is fresh out with their 2016 Energy Assessment–an analysis of energy trends, opportunities, challenges and risks. In the assessment (full copy below) HBK Energy Advisors (a division of HBK) weighs in on issues like Obama’s odious Clean Power Plan, renewable energy, LNG and more. Of particular interest to MDN is a series of predictions made not in the official assessment, but in an accompanying blog post on the HBK website. The analysts make a series of predictions for Pennsylvania, Ohio, New Jersey and Florida. The first prediction for Ohio is that pipeline work in the Buckeye State will increase, mostly due to the NEXUS pipeline. Which we find interesting. Just last week we told you an analyst from Wood Mackenzie predicted the NEXUS won’t get built (see 
Last Thursday MDN brought you the news that the Dept. of Justice has decided to try to block the merger/buyout of oilfield services company Baker Hughes by bigger oilfield services company Halliburton (see 
MDN spotted a fascinating story in NGI’s Shale Daily publication about what may be a new trend developing in the Utica Shale. It all concerns interlateral well spacing. What the heck is that? When you drill a shale well, like a Utica well, you can drill down from a single location (i.e. well pad) multiple times and when you turn the drill bit horizontally, you drill an entirely new well. So each well pad contains, typically, anywhere from 2-12 underground wells. Each horizontal well underground is called a lateral. When you drill a lateral, you frack it–using small explosive charges to crack the rock apart near the lateral, injecting water with sand into the cracks. The water drains out, the sand remains “propping open” the cracks to allow natural gas (or oil, or NGLs) to drain out of the cracks, into the well and up the borehole to the surface. In the past few years most drillers have found putting the laterals about 750 feet apart keeps them far enough apart that the cracks from one well don’t interfere with the cracks from another well (see image below). Ideally you want the laterals to be far enough away that they don’t drain any gas from the next lateral–but close enough that you’re not leaving undrained rock in between. That distance in the Marcellus/Utica seems to be around 750 feet. But Rice Energy and Gulfport Energy, two major players in the Utica, are moving back to 1,000 foot spacing between their laterals. Why?…
The Pittsburgh Business Times hosted an event yesterday in Beaver County, PA–the place where Shell is spending money to explore whether or not to build an ethane cracker plant. Seems like we’ve been writing about Shell’s potential ethane cracker forever. We’ve chronicled just about every up and down. We’ve also highlighted various initiatives they’ve undertaken since announcing Monaca, PA as their chosen site–something they did back in March 2012, now four years ago (see