The Consumer Energy Alliance says if legal and regulatory roadblocks were removed, the United States could be producing and meeting 95% of it’s own energy needs in the next eight years—by 2020. The Marcellus and Utica Shale play a role in such a plan.
Read More “Energy Group Says U.S. Can be Off Foreign Oil by 2020”
The “best of the rest” – stories that caught MDN’s eye that you may be interested in reading:
Read More “Marcellus & Utica Shale Story Links: Mon, Aug 27, 2012”
Below are upcoming events for this week and next.
Read More “Calendar of Events for Aug 27 – Sep 9, 2012 [Free]”
An energy industry consultant and investment analyst writes an interesting article on Seeking Alpha about Exxon Mobil’s commitment to dry shale shale (“methane only”). Richard Zeits characterizes Exxon’s shift away from dry to wet gas (oil and natural gas liquids) as “radical,” citing Exxon’s onshore rig count decline from 71 to 50 rigs (a 30% drop) since the beginning of this year as evidence of the change. He estimates they use less than 10 of the remaining 50 rigs for drilling in dry gas areas.
Zeits says that Exxon may not be able to hold a sizable amount of leased acreage they hold in dry gas areas of the Marcellus and Fayetteville Shale basins because of the reduced rig count. That is, they won’t be able to drill on the leased acreage by the time the leases expire—especially in the Marcellus where they’re only operating four rigs on 660,000 acres of holdings.
Read More “Will Exxon’s Lack of Marcellus Drilling Lead to Expired Leases?”
New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg, along with the “father” of hydraulic fracturing, George Mitchell, jointly published an opinion piece in yesterday’s Washington Post that supports fracking. Or rather offers qualified support, provided fracking is done they way they want it done.
Bloomberg and Mitchell offer four reasons why fracking is good, and then say their individual foundations will work together to “encourage better state regulation of fracking around five key principles.” Here are those five principles:
Looks like the Town of Perinton in Monroe County, NY (near Rochester) is lined up to ban fracking. The town board passed a draft ordinance in July (three ordinances in fact). The proposed ordinances are currently under review and a final vote will be taken in late September.
Read More “Town of Perinton, NY to Vote on Fracking Ban in September”
A report authored by the Dept. of Energy (DOE) and published at the end of June (but only now is being pushed by the DOE as a “new report”) takes a close look at natural gas and its role in the larger U.S. energy picture. The report, titled Role of Alternative Energy Sources: Natural Gas Power Technology Assessment (full 165-page copy embedded below), uses seven criteria to evaluate the role of natural gas and concludes that it’s the best current choice for powering electrical generating plants in the U.S.
But what about greenhouse gases—the so-called “fact” that methane leakage from shale gas drilling is contributing “dangerous” amounts of GHG to the atmosphere (as say Cornell profs Robert Howarth and Tony Ingraffea)? The report says fugitive methane escaping into the atmosphere is more than offset by reduced emissions from power plants burning clean natural gas as opposed to alternatives like coal and oil.
Read More “New DOE Study Says Natural Gas Best Choice for Now”
Even though it didn’t happen in the Marcellus or Utica Shale area, this one is just too delicious not to share. The location was outside of Boulder, Colorado, but this story could just as easily have been in the Marcellus/Utica. The same kind of anti-drilling nutters inhabit the Eastern seaboard area too.
Some 30 protesters showed up last Saturday at a horizontal drilling/fracking site in Boulder County, CO where Encana is drilling five wells. Although the protesters claim that drilling and fracking create a toxic hell on earth, at least 10 of the “protesters” were their own children, one of them a one-year old. Brought along to a dangerous drilling site with “millions of gallons of industrial waste.” Must be it wasn’t so dangerous after all:
Read More “Protesters Bring Their Kids to “Toxic” Fracking Site”
It’s a story that just keeps repeating: How the Marcellus Shale has led to businesses expanding, adding employees (i.e. jobs), providing more tax revenue to communities and ultimately an improvement in the standard of living for the entire community.
Here’s yet another story from the thousands of similar stories that abound in the Marcellus and Utica Shale. This one is a trucking company in southwestern Pennsylvania:
Read More “Pittsburgh Businesses Rapidly Expand from Marcellus Shale”
Even without government incentives, trucking companies are finding it makes economic sense to switch from burning diesel fuel to burning compressed natural gas (CNG). Case in point:
Licking County, located in central Ohio, has not yet seen any fracking of shale gas wells, but a new committee sponsored by the county has been established to study fracking and to prepare for “someday” when it may happen. Most of the focus of the committee (so far) seems to be on road use agreements.
Read More “Licking County, OH Forms Fracking Advisory Committee”
The “best of the rest” – stories that caught MDN’s eye that you may be interested in reading:
Read More “Marcellus & Utica Shale Story Links: Fri, Aug 24, 2012”
Late last week Pennsylvania released figures for natural gas production in the state for the first half of this year (see this MDN story). At the time MDN reported—based on what we now know was faulty data—that production had increased 12% over the previous 6-month period. Boy was that ever wrong!
By Monday, it was reported that (oops) Chesapeake Energy’s data was not reflected in the numbers (see this MDN story). Chesapeake just happens to be, ahem, the largest producer in the state. A lot of finger pointing quickly ensued. Chesapeake said in essence, “Hey, we provided the data! It was the screwed-up PA DEP database that didn’t show it.” But the PA DEP quickly shot back that the data provided by Chesapeake was late in arriving and full of errors and their database rightly screened out the data as bad.
Read More “PA Production Data Now Complete – Astonishing Results”
It seems Democrats themselves have grown tired of anti-fracking shenanigans by their own people at public gatherings. Former Sec. of Energy (and former Governor of New Mexico) Bill Richardson was in New York City yesterday speaking on renewable energy at an event hosted by the Democrat party and Gov. Andrew Cuomo. A couple of anti-frackers who had “slipped in” stood up to protest, unfurling an anti-fracking banner and making claims that fracking would poison water supplies.
Here’s what happened:
Read More “Former Energy Sec. Richardson Supports Cuomo Fracking Plan”
Several doctors from the Broome County Medical Society (BCMS) attended a Vestal (Broome County, NY) Town Board meeting on Monday to ask them to vote for a delay in hydraulic fracturing until a so-called independent health study can be completed. One of those doctors was Niru Anne, a cancer doctor at Lourdes Hospital in Binghamton and vice president of BCMS.
For a smart person, Dr. Anne is extremely uninformed when it comes to fracking:
Read More “Anti-Fracking Doctor Unsuccessful at Vestal, NY Board Meeting”
According to Rhonda Reda, executive director for the Ohio Oil and Gas Energy Education Program, interest in drilling in Ohio that started in the eastern part of the state—in the prolific Utica Shale—will soon start moving to south and west in the state. In fact, there’s already signs that drilling interest is expanding southwest to Ross County.
Read More “Ohio Shale Drilling Starting to Expand South & West”