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British shale pioneer to push back against local council

Shale pioneer Cuadrilla Resources says it will appeal county decision to deny permits for a drilling campaign that would include hydraulic fracturing. Photo courtesy of Cuadrilla Resources LONDON, July 24 (UPI) — British shale pioneer Cuadrilla Resources said it planned to appeal June’s decisions by a county council to deny permits for a hydraulic fracturing campaign. "We have given careful consideration to appeal the planning decisions taken by Lancashire County Council," Cuadrilla Chief Executive Officer Francis Egan said in a statement. "This is a natural step in the democratic process for deciding any planning application." The council in Lancashire last month voted to refuse a permit to start a hydraulic fracturing campaign in the Preston New Road and Roseacre Wood sites. The council said it refused the applications because of noise and visual impact concerns, and "potentially severe" impacts on road infrastructure and traffic, respectively. In the past, the […]

Posted On : Published By : Tom Whipple
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Chesapeake to Eliminate Dividend to Pay for Capital Spending

Chesapeake Energy Corp. CHK -9.54 % said Tuesday that it will eliminate its shareholder dividend starting in the third quarter and redirect the money to capital spending, the latest round of cutbacks for the U.S. shale driller. Shares of Chesapeake, down 48% this year, fell 1.2% to $10.15 a share in premarket trading. Chesapeake estimated that getting rid of the annual dividend of 35 cents a share will save the company $240 million a year. The company plans to use the money for its 2016 capital program. Chesapeake said it has also agreed to sell some properties to FourPoint Energy LLC. Chesapeake has struggled to recover from years of aggressive spending as the land-grab approach the company pioneered for oil and gas drilling meant it spent more than its wells generated in profit. But under Doug Lawler, who joined as chief executive in June 2013, the company has been […]

Posted On : Published By : Tom Whipple
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Study shows more hospital stays in three fracking counties

A fracking operation is set up on this farm near Dimock in Susquehanna County. A new study shows that in Susquehanna, Bradford and Wayne counties, people who live near fracking wells were more likely to have hospital visits. (CAROLYN COLE / LOS ANGELES TIMES) Researchers comparing hospital visits in three rural Northeast Pennsylvania counties found a higher rate of hospital visits in counties with a heavy gas industry presence. Residents of heavily drilled Bradford and Susquehanna counties were admitted to hospitals at higher rates than in neighboring Wayne County where drilling is banned, University of Pennsylvania and Columbia University researchers stated in a paper published in the peer-reviewed PLOS One scientific journal last week. The researchers used hospital-reported inpatient data from 2007, when drilling began, to 2011, the latest year available, said Penn Medicine researcher Dr. Reynold Panettieri Jr., one of the study’s authors. Relying on 95,000 inpatient records, […]

Posted On : Published By : Tom Whipple
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Oh frack, now there’s radiation in Pennsylvania’s water

Drilling a horizontal shale gas well in Appalachia In Fredericktown, Pennsylvania, water that feeds into a Pittsburgh treatment plant has been found to contain more than 60 times what is considered the safe level of radiation. The water Dufalla tested? It’s from Ten Mile Creek, which eventually feeds into a nearby water treatment plant. Not surprisingly, it’s not good to have 60 times the maximum allowed radium in drinking water, and it’s not something that’s easy to filter out. Drinking water is just one concern. There’s also the fish swimming in radium-tainted water to worry about. Oh, well, if the gas industry officials said it, it has to be true, right? This is nothing new, though. Tests proved even higher levels of radiation were present in Pennsylvania’s streams two years ago . Just last week, fracking in Pennsylvania was linked to higher rates of cancer, skin conditions, heart disease […]

Posted On : Published By : Tom Whipple
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Study: Utica Shale Larger Than Previous Estimates

The technically recoverable resources of the Utica shale play are larger than previously thought, according to a study from West Virginia University. The size of the Utica shale play’s technically recoverable resources is larger than previously thought, a recent study by West Virginia University (WVU) has found. WVU found that the Utica play contains technically recoverable resources of 782 trillion cubic feet (Tcf) of natural gas and around 1.9 billion barrels of oil. That’s higher than the U.S. Geological Survey’s (USGS) 2012 estimate of technically recoverable resources at 38 Tcf of gas and 940 million barrels of oil. The study results indicate that the Utica – which spans West Virginia, Kentucky, Pennsylvania, Ohio and New York – is comparable to the Marcellus shale play in terms of size and potential recoverable resources. The Marcellus is the large U.S. shale play and second largest shale oil and gas play in […]

Posted On : Published By : Tom Whipple
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London proposes new fracking restrictions

British government proposes pulling some parts of the country off the table for hydraulic fracturing. Photo courtesy of Cuadrilla Resources. LONDON, July 16 (UPI) — The British government boasted of its environmental track record Thursday, saying it was taking steps toward excluding some areas from hydraulic fracturing. "The United Kingdom has one of the best track records in the world when it comes to protecting our environment while also developing our industries – and we’ve brought that experience to bear on the shale gas protections," Energy Minister Andrea Leadsom said in a statement. The British government published draft regulations that would place groundwater aquifers, as well as parks and heritage sites, off limits to potential hydraulic fracturing activities. Shale energy is in its infancy in the country, though Leadsom said the government was committed to developing the sector safely and economically. Her comments follow the publication of a set […]

Posted On : Published By : Tom Whipple
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Shale Gas Supply Held Hostage by Oil to Drop by Most in a Year

(Bloomberg) — After four years of record supply, America’s natural gas output is showing signs of weakness as producers retreat amid tumbling oil prices. Gas production from the seven largest U.S. shale basins will fall 0.6 percent to 45.1 billion cubic feet a day in August from a month earlier, the biggest drop since March 2014, the U.S. Energy Information Administration said Monday in its monthly Drilling Productivity report. EIA estimates have shown supply declines since June. The government’s forecasts signal the collapse in crude oil prices, which have plunged by about half over the past year, is reverberating in the natural gas market. As drillers shut wells in liquids-rich deposits from North Dakota to Texas, they’re also curtailing gas output from those reservoirs. That may prevent further price declines for gas, which has slid almost a third over the same period. “Gas is being held captive by oil,” […]

Posted On : Published By : Tom Whipple
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Shale Gas Bulldozer Runs Over Pessimists

“…why do operators keep drilling while their own over-production has depressed the price of natural gas by half of its value?” Art Berman, 2010 Thirty years ago, at an energy conference at M.I.T., I made a presentation about our research on natural gas supply, and opened with a joke. (That is, intentional humor.) The gas industry, I noted, kept saying that prices were too low to cover their costs, while continuing to drill. What could explain this? Management psychology? Animal spirits? Finance theory (option valuations)? No, the explanation was found in “The Journal of Abnormal Psychology.” The joke was much appreciated, except by the natural gas producers in the audience. Now, the same question could be raised. After all, for most of a decade, predictions of a production collapse have floated around the punditsphere, while estimates of the breakeven price have tended to be well above those which have […]

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Accelerating Shale Gas Declines Show Supply Held Hostage by Oil

Natural gas output from U.S. shale formations is set to fall for a third straight month after the collapse in crude prices forced drillers out of fields that yield both oil and gas. After four years of record supply, natural gas output is showing signs of weakness as producers pull back amid tumbling oil prices. Gas production from the seven largest shale basins will fall 0.6 percent to 45.1 billion cubic feet a day in August from a month earlier, the biggest drop since March 2014, the U.S. Energy Information Administration said Monday in its monthly Drilling Productivity report. EIA estimates have shown supply declines since June. The government’s forecasts signal that the 51 percent collapse in crude oil prices since June 20, 2014, is reverberating in the natural gas market. As drillers shut wells in liquids-rich deposits from North Dakota to Texas, they’re also curtailing gas output from […]

Posted On : Published By : Tom Whipple
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Gas overtakes coal at US power stations

The US generated more of its electricity from gas than from coal for the first time ever in April — in a sign of how the shale boom is putting mounting pressure on the country’s mining industry. Plunging prices for natural gas, which have fallen alongside oil since last summer, led to it being used to generate 31 per cent of America’s electricity in April, while coal contributed 30 per cent. This was the first month in US history that gas-fired electricity generation surpassed coal-fired generation, according to SNL Energy, a research firm — although it came close in 2012 when gas prices were also very weak. In 2010, coal provided 45 per cent of US power. Since then, competition from cheap shale gas — unlocked by the rise of horizontal drilling and hydraulic fracturing — plus a growing regulatory burden on coal-fired power plants, has squeezed out coal […]

Posted On : Published By : Tom Whipple