Japan Negotiates to Buy Marcellus Gas
Japan needs natural gas and they need it badly. After the Fukushima nuclear disaster last year, Japan has shut down 49 of their 50 nuclear reactors. That spells an impending shortage of electricity in the country. One of the ways to make it up is by using natural gas. Natural gas currently costs over $17 per million BTUs (mmBtu) in Asia. The U.S. commodity price of natural gas is currently under $2 mmBtu. So Japanese trading house Sumitomo Corp and Tokyo Gas Co Ltd are in talks with Dominion Resources to import up to 2.3 million tons of liquefied natural gas (LNG) per year for 20 years starting in 2017.
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Lest you think MDN is a bit off the reservation when it comes to criticisms of the federal Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), you might want to read about EPA Region 6 administrator Al Armendariz in an expose by Forbes magazine. Region 6 oversees Texas and surrounding states. Armendariz, a former professor at Southern Methodist University and appointed by President Obama in November 2009 to be Region 6 administrator, is caught on tape talking about his philosophy of “enforcement” and how to target oil and gas companies. He compares his approach to enforcement to how the Romans used to enter a village, find the first five men they could find and crucify them on the spot so the other villagers would be compliant. (See the embedded video below.)
Does fracking cause earthquakes? A newly released report from England reportedly confirms a link between hydraulic fracturing of a shale gas well and earthquake activity. And this is not an injection well, but a standard, hydraulically fractured natural gas well. A copy of the report is embedded below. MDN will walk you through the background, what really happened—and why it happened. This is “the rest of the story” you won’t get anywhere else.
An update of the ongoing story about Chesapeake Energy and the disclosure that CEO Aubrey McClendon’s has borrowed over $1 billion to help cover drilling costs. Chesapeake’s stock has taken a hit, down 25 percent this month, heading for what may be its worst monthly performance since the global financial crisis in 2008 when the company’s stock ultimately slide 38 percent in a single month.