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BHP Billiton, the world's largest miner and a top investor in U.S. oil and gas, said on Tuesday its U.S. shale business would break even from 2016, generating cash that would grow to almost $3 billion a year by the end of the decade. Analysts have voiced concern over the growing proportion of BHP's spending being allocated to petroleum, where volumes and returns have proven disappointing for now. In a presentation to analysts in Houston, BHP said it was on track to hit its 2014 petroleum production target. It said a spending programme of $4 billion per year would help...

Depending on whom you ask, it looks like California is getting closer to tapping the nearly 15 billion barrels of recoverable oil that lies deep in the Monterey Shale. On September 20, 2013, Governor Jerry Brown signed SB 4 into effect, a bill that provides California with its first set of requirements specifically associated with hydraulic fracturing and other well stimulation techniques, such as acidizing. Less than one month later, the California Department of Conservation (DOC) has released proposed regulations applicable to well stimulation treatments in the state, initiated the State’s environmental review process and set the stage for the...

The economic future seemed so tantalizing just two years ago as the nation’s big oil firms rushed into Kansas. They snapped up mineral leases from landowners for high prices and drilled horizontal wells to extract unknown riches from the same Mississippian Lime formation that had spawned an oil boom in neighboring Oklahoma. Things have changed. Most of those big out-of-state players are gone. The biggest blow came when oil giant Shell Oil Co. halted its Kansas exploratory drilling program in May and has since put up for sale 625,000 acres of leases it owns in the state. Life here has...

State-owned energy giants and international majors continue to top lists of the world’s largest oil companies. But the U.S. shale revolution is beginning to make a mark, as U.S. independent oil and gas producers rise in the ranks. Energy Intelligence has released its list of the world’s 100 largest oil and gas companies, with several independents — including Houston-based Anadarko Petroleum and Apache Corp. — making among the biggest gains. The annual ranking is based on the prior year’s reserves, production, refined product sales and refinery distillation capacity. Anadarko jumped two spots to No. 44 and Apache rose one spot...

In the short term, the Iran deal will ease the political risk premium baked into oil prices. In the long-term a gush of Iranian oil could soften oil prices enough to kill the economics of America’s tight oil boom. Given sufficient investment in drilling and infrastructure, there are ample oil reserves in Iraq and Iran to add another 5 million bpd to global oil supplies within 10 years. The Eagle Ford and Permian Basin and Bakken need sustained high oil prices to make the economics of expensive drilling and steep decline rates pay off. If crude oil benchmarks were to...

Our economy is straining at the bit to grow out of the Great Recession. You wouldn’t know that from the dreary news on both the jobs and GDP growth front. The good news is found in the incredible potential for high-paying jobs, growth and wealth creation bubbling up in America’s manufacturing sector. Manufacturing is hot, even though we’re supposed to be in a post-industrial economy. The transformation in American manufacturing today is redolent of a century ago when innovation and growth in the industrial landscape was blossoming in both big companies and start-ups. On today’s start-up front we have emerging...

After years of steadily rising prices, “low-cost fuel” may seem like an oxymoron. But thanks to a steady surge in domestic oil and gas production, energy experts say consumers could enjoy inexpensive gasoline and natural gas for years to come. MAP MASTER“The outlook is for a low-cost energy economy in the U.S.,” said Daniel Fine, associate director of the New Mexico Center for Energy Policy, which is run by the New Mexico Institute of Mining and Technology in Socorro. “This is a long-term trend, not an isolated event, and it’s something almost revolutionary.

After fomenting fears of fracking and fossil fuels, the administration's campaign to put food in our gas tanks has wiped out millions of acres of conservation land, destroyed habitat and polluted water supplies. Ethanol was supposed to save the earth and pave the way to energy independence. It has done neither. We are getting closer to energy independence but it is thanks to the technology known as hydraulic fracturing, or fracking, that has unleashed our vast reserves of oil and natural gas formerly trapped in shale formations underneath much of the U.S. Fracking was supposed to be environmentally dangerous, a...

By 2007, a century of drilling had drained the biggest U.S. sandstone reservoirs and sent oil and gas producers overseas to virgin lands. Then a new combination of drilling techniques came into play, sparking a rush to amass as much once-abandoned American land as possible. Merging hydraulic fracturing and horizontal drilling, wildcatters blasted through tight rock formations that had fed the country’s sandstone with crude oil and natural gas for millions of years. For the U.S. oil and gas industry, it meant wiping the map clean of its aging framework for producing from softer sandstone, and starting over. “The amount...

China's top two oil and gas companies have accelerated shale gas exploration. PetroChina Co, China's largest oil and gas producer, announced on Friday that its first shale gas project in Daqing, Heilongjiang province, started test runs in early October. Sinopec Co, the country's largest refiner, said it has discovered enough shale gas resources for commercial scale production in Chongqing on Oct 28. The company said its shale gas block in Chongqing has reached the maximum daily output of 547,000 cubic meters. Insiders said the top two oil and gas companies – PetroChina Co and Sinopec Co – have accelerated their...

The transformation of American liberalism over the past half-century is nowhere more apparent than in the disputes now roiling a relatively obscure section of upstate New York. In 1965, as part of his "war on poverty," President Lyndon Johnson created the Appalachian Regional Commission. Among the areas to be served by the commission were the Southern Tier counties of New York state, including Broome, Tioga and Chemung. The commission's central aim was to "Increase job opportunities and per capita income in Appalachia to reach parity with the nation." Like so many Great Society antipoverty programs, the effort largely failed. The...

IIt’s no secret that North Dakota’s oil industry is booming. Advancements in hydraulic fracturing have helped Western North Dakota experience month after month of record-setting oil production, making for one of the fastest-growing economic expansions the U.S. has ever seen. With the region having one of the lowest unemployment rates in the country and generating over 75,000 new jobs in the past few years, thousands of workers have showed up searching for high-paying jobs. Oil field workers in the state saw an average annual wage of $112,462 in 2012. Competition has intensified since the boom started around 2007, but entry...

Marathon Oil aims to keep driving down drilling and completion times in the U.S. plays like the Eagle Ford next year as it squeezes more money out of its assets, the company’s chief executive said in a conference call Tuesday. “We’re making sure we generate the best economics,” in the shale plays and other onshore drilling regions, said Lee Tillman, president and CEO of Marathon Oil, during a call with investors and analysts. “As we look forward to 2014 and begin to look at frac crudes, we still see room there to drive that commercial element down a bit lower...

When we think fracking, we look at places like Texas or North Dakota, and now even California as it gets going. But there are whispers coming out of Illinois that have us wondering. Yes. Illinois. For a couple years now we’ve been hearing the rumors; Illinois farmers have been leasing their land to drillers who have gone unidentified. We know it’s in southern Illinois, and we know that land is getting snatched up, but by whom and where they plan to drill – it’s been hush-hush. If we don’t keep our ear to the ground, we could miss something big....

EIA's new Drilling Productivity Report (DPR) takes a fresh look at oil and natural gas production, starting with an assessment of how and where drilling for hydrocarbons is taking place (see map). The first edition of the DPR was released today. As mentioned in yesterday's Today in Energy story, new technologies for drilling and producing natural gas and oil have made traditional measures of productivity, such as a simple count of active rotary drilling rigs, obsolete. With more than half of newly-drilled wells now producing both oil and natural gas, it is also no longer sufficient to categorize rigs as...

LISBON - Some local and state officials updated residents on where the shale fracking natural gas industry currently stands in Columbiana County during an informational meeting held at the Crestview Performing Arts Center this past week. "We're just really getting started with this in Columbiana County," said County Commissioner Timothy Weigle, when asked. "We've talked to our friends in Carroll County (which has more than 10 times the number of wells producing gas as there are here). They are a couple million ahead in tax revenue." Here, commissioners are only seeing a slight tax increase at this point, but it...

The benefits of hydraulic fracturing in terms of job creation and meeting energy demands have been drastically exaggerated, while the consequences of the controversial practice could prove cataclysmic, geopolitical commentator Ian Crane told RT. RT: You used to work in the oil industry yourself: what is it that makes fracking worse than the other extraction techniques of oil and gas? Ian Crane: What we’re talking about primarily here is the extraction of shale gas from unconventional geology. This is a very different technology, a very different technique from the usual process of extracting from conventional reservoirs. The gas has to...

North Dakota's rapidly rising oil output continues to defy the sceptics, who have predicted that production would stop growing as declining output from existing wells offsets extra production from new drilling. Oil production soared to 911,000 barrels per day in August, up more than 200,000 bpd compared with the same month last year, the state's Department of Mineral Resources (DMR) said this week. Production is on course to hit 1 million bpd by the end of the year or early 2014, according to the DMR. By the end of August, 9,452 wells were in production. But another 450 had been...

MIDLAND, Texas -— In a faded West Texas town dotted with vacant buildings and potholed streets is a sparkling storefront window and a curious display: rows of diamond-studded Rolex watches, awaiting buyers whose pockets are packed with oil money. The surge in oil drilling has drawn money and men like a magnet to run-down communities that haven't seen a boom since the 1980s. But leaders and residents here are increasingly mindful that the runaway riches tapped by hydraulic fracturing will eventually run out. And they are determined to live by a fondly remembered bumper sticker from the last bust: Please,...

OPEC heavyweight Saudi Arabia is preparing to be among the first countries outside North America to use shale gas for power generation and thereby save more of its crude oil for lucrative exports. Inspired by a shale gas boom in the United States, which has transformed the country from the world's largest gas importer to a budding exporter, Riyadh plans to take its first steps to commercialise its own large unconventional deposits. "We are ready to start producing our own shale gas and unconventional resources in various types in the next few years and deliver them to consumers," Saudi Aramco...