Category: Shale Gas

Firewood on the front porch of Terri and Bob Tomchak’s home in Bridgton, Maine on Friday, Oct. 23, 2015. FACEBOOK TWITTER GOOGLE+ LINKEDIN PRINT E-MAIL Text Size: A | A CONCORD, N.H. — Northeasterners who are digging deeper into their pockets to pay for firewood this season can add a new scapegoat to the roster of usual market forces: fracking. Yep, a timber industry representative in New Hampshire said those hydraulic fracturing well sites in Pennsylvania’s Marcellus Shale formation to suck natural gas out of the ground are using construction "mats" made of hardwood logs — think of the corduroy roads seen in sepia-toned photographs from the 1800s — to get heavy equipment over mucky ground, wetlands or soft soils. That increased demand has crept down the chimney into fireplaces. Prices in parts of New England are averaging $325 a cord and can even push past $400 for a […]

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Range Resources betting on Utica and Marcellus shale after selling off acreage in Virginia that accounted for about 7.5 percent of output. Image courtesy of Range Resources FORT WORTH, Texas, Nov. 4 (UPI) — U.S. shale leader Range Resources said it was selling off its holdings in Virginia to bring value forward at a time when the industry is in a downturn. Range said it was selling off its holdings in the Nora basin in southwestern Virginia, where the company held about 460,000 net acres and operated around 3,500 wells. "While these are great assets operated by a talented team, bringing the value forward through a sale was the best decision for our shareholders," Range Resources top executive Jeff Ventura said in a statement. The company said it produced around 109 million cubic feet per day from its Nora assets, which represented about 7.5 percent of its total output […]

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Expectant mothers who live near active natural gas wells operated by the fracking industry in Pennsylvania are at an increased risk of giving birth prematurely and for having high-risk pregnancies, new Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health research suggests. The findings, published online last week in the journal Epidemiology, shed light on some of the possible adverse health outcomes associated with the fracking industry, which has been booming in the decade since the first wells were drilled. Health officials have been concerned about the effect of this type of drilling on air and water quality, as well as the stress of living near a well where just developing the site of the well can require 1,000 truck trips on once-quiet roads. “The growth in the fracking industry has gotten way out ahead of our ability to assess what the environmental and, just as importantly, public health impacts are,” […]

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Photographer: Eddie Seal/Bloomberg The oiliest county in Texas has seen its new natural gas production capacity more than double as drillers home in on their most profitable acreage. The peak output rate from new gas wells in Karnes County has surged 134 percent since January, estimates from Drillinginfo show. The only other county in Texas’s Eagle Ford shale patch where new gas capacity’s gaining is Live Oak, about 50 miles southwest of Karnes, the Austin-based energy data provider said. Gas producers are focusing on the most prolific parts of their plays as they grapple with the worst price collapse since 2008, and Karnes County has long been a sweet spot in Texas’s Eagle Ford shale. The 20,000-square-mile shale formation supplies about one-sixth of the nation’s crude. Karnes County, southeast of San Antonio, is home to “top-tier acreage," Chris Smith, senior research analyst at Drillinginfo , said in a telephone […]

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(Bloomberg) — For the first time since America’s shale boom began, the flow of natural gas from the nation’s biggest reservoir is close to dropping below year-ago levels. Output from the Marcellus basin in Pennsylvania and West Virginia is faltering as pipeline capacity fails to keep up with the surge in production. While space on Appalachian pipelines has more than doubled this year, it hasn’t been enough to keep the flow moving freely, according to Bloomberg New Energy Finance. That has some producers “choking back” the output from wells in the play, said Charles Blanchard, an analyst at BNEF in New York. “They’re saying it’s not even worth it day to day to keep my wells online because I’m losing money on every molecule that I sell.” Marcellus production has surged more than 14-fold in the past eight years. Now drillers are waiting on seven new Appalachian pipeline projects […]

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Natural gas is so abundant and cheap in much of the U.S. that producers want to export it overseas. Except in New England, where gas is so hard to get that companies are importing it from as far away as Yemen. The U.S. shale boom that has produced a glut of gas—and helped lower many Americans’ home heating bills—has largely bypassed the energy-starved New England. Few pipelines are available to ferry gas from Pennsylvania and Ohio to Connecticut and Maine, and new lines proposed in the region won’t go into service until 2018, or later. Gas plants currently supply 44% of New England’s electricity, up from just 18% in 2000. Consumers and businesses are also swapping their old furnaces that burn heating oil for newer models that run on gas. So as the weather cools, problems loom. When brutal cold hits this winter, energy prices will soar. In Massachusetts, […]

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Just as gas export-terminals are preparing to start up along America’s Gulf Coast, the oil-price crash has made it unprofitable to send the U.S. fuel abroad, according to the North America head of power and natural gas supplier Engie. It costs about $2 to liquefy gas and another $3 to take it from the U.S. to Asia, said Zin Smati, president and chief executive officer of Engie’s GDF Suez Energy North America. Engie changed its name from GDF Suez SA in April. Those costs used to leave plenty of profit margin when the gap between LNG prices in Asia and natural gas in the U.S. was more than $14 per million British thermal units. Now, the spread is less than $5, according to data compiled by Bloomberg. “You cannot ship gas from the United States anymore,” Smati said at the Council of the Americas energy conference at Rice University […]

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While everyone is watching the oil bust, there is another bust going on – one for natural gas. Before there was a boom in oil production in the United States, there was the “shale gas revolution.” That is where we all became familiar with terms like “fracking.” And the Marcellus, Haynesville, and Barnett Shales were famous long before the Bakken or Permian. The surge in natural gas production crashed prices, fueling a huge increase in activity in petrochemicals and causing a major switch from coal to natural gas in the electric power industry. Aside from a few brief moments (such as the winter of 2014), natural gas has mostly traded around $4 per million Btu (MMBtu) or lower since the financial crisis of 2008. (Click to enlarge) But unlike oil, the boom in shale gas did not stop with plummeting prices. U.S. natural gas production continued to climb. For […]

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America’s shale gas boom hasn’t exactly been booming lately. Natural gas production from the seven largest U.S. shale deposits will drop for a fourth straight month in October to average 44.784 billion cubic feet a day, the lowest since March, based on an Energy Information Administration forecast released Monday. That’s the longest streak of monthly declines in government data going back to 2007. The pullback follows a decade of surging gas production that created a glut of the heating fuel and sent prices plunging to record lows in some regions. The biggest declines forecast for October are in oil-rich deposits such as the Eagle Ford shale formation in Texas, where drillers are idling rigs in response to a collapse in crude prices. Pipeline constraints in Appalachia aren’t helping either. Yield from the Marcellus shale of the eastern U.S., the nation’s biggest gas field, will fall 0.5 percent, the EIA […]

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