Free Republic

Relying on shale gas would be a “very expensive” solution to meeting the world’s growing demand for energy, the chief executive of BHP Billiton, the mining, oil and gas group, has said. Andrew Mackenzie, who took over at BHP last year, also called for a price to be put on greenhouse gas emissions to address the threat of global warming, and said the mining industry needed to do more to develop technology to capture and store carbon dioxide. Speaking to the Financial Times in Houston, Mr Mackenzie said it was “completely impractical” to suggest that shale gas could be the...

GILLSBURG, Miss. (AP) — Residents living above an oil-rich shale formation that stretches across southwest Mississippi and Louisiana have been waiting on a boom for years. A steady trickle of drilling is already boosting the rural region's economy, and spending by two oil companies could make 2014 the year that many other locals finally cash in on the oil far beneath their feet. Already, Max Lawson has spent hours watching the round-the-clock work of shoving pipe into the ground in his back pasture. The process began two years ago when Encana Corp. built a big gravel pad, but didn't take...

Since 2010, the phrase "rising service intensity" of unconventional drilling and completions has become a household term. What this refers to is the fact that more stages per well and longer horizontal laterals demand more of oil service contractors than ever before. More proppant, more frac fluid, more horsepower, more water, more infrastructure, more transportation, etc. Several other associated trends include more wells drilled per rig and rising service company revenues per rig. A phrase you don't hear as often is "rising labor intensity" of unconventional drilling and completions. But we would argue that this is just as important. Just...

Aged, slow-churning pumpjacks known as nodding donkeys have found new life pumping oil in the plains near Bakersfield in West Texas and other places elevated by the nation’s oil boom. And the familiar horse-head pumps are getting makeovers that could keep them on the job for many more years as components in a technological revolution aimed at extracting more oil from sometimes stubborn shale reservoirs. Makers of oil field equipment say the next mutation in the evolving U.S. shale venture must dig into its biggest engineering hurdle: Oil producers leave a massive amount of hydrocarbons behind when they combine modern...

The world’s next shale revolution likely will be in Australia, which appears to be the most attractive place for companies to pursue tight oil and gas, according to a Lux Research analysis released Tuesday. While companies have eyed shale development in China, lured by the prospect of huge reserves and easy financing, Australia has the know-how, experience and infrastructure to be a more attractive place to drill into shale plays, the analysis says. It also beats out Argentina, which is believed to have expansive shale reserves, but has experienced political instability despite attractive government incentives, according to the Lux report,...

France's Total has become the first oil and gas major to enter Britain's shale gas market. On Monday, the French company announced its acquisition of a 40% interest in two licenses in northern England for up to $48 million. Total's involvement follows UK shale gas acquisitions in northwest England by GDF Suez and Centrica last year, and serves as a major catalyst to Britain's nascent shale gas industry. UK Prime Minister David Cameron said on Monday that local officials that permit shale gas development to occur will be able to retain all of the business taxes they collect from the...

Leading left-wing advocacy group MoveOn.org announced a new effort on Thursday to oppose innovations that are propelling the country towards a new abundance of domestically produced energy. MoveOn bemoaned in an email to supporters the “troubling trend” of increased energy production, which is reducing the U.S. trade deficit, creating well-paying jobs, stabilizing global energy prices, and undermining the economic engine behind some of the world’s most repressive regimes. MoveOn announced the creation of a new effort called “#FrackingFighter,” which “seeks to slow down the fracking boom that is anticipated to occur across the United States in 2014 and beyond.” The...

There's A Huge Bullish Story On Energy And The Economy And It's Sitting Right Below The Radar Rob Wile Yesterday at 9:34 AM 4 Williston, North Dakota Economists have recently been scrambling to crank up there U.S. GDP growth forecasts.“What’s going on here?” asked Potomac Research Group’s Greg Valliere. “In a word, it’s energy.”In a note today, Valliere called this a huge story that’s below most people’s radar.As Bloomberg’s Bob Ivry said this morning about the Great American Shale Boom: “Nobody Expected U.S. Oil Boom to Be This Boomy.”It’s basically true — there have been lots of doubters who’ve argued...

The Great American Oil & Gas Boom & the Future of Iran No country, No Nation, has ever added oil production capacity – yes ever – like the United States has in the past few years. America has gone from producing 5 Million barrels of oil per day in 2011 to over 7.5 Million barrels this past year; and will soon surpass 10 Million barrels of oil production domestically. It’s an incredible oil boom that will have a profound impact on the lives of ordinary Americans. By the time Obama leaves office, he will have presided over a country that...

China’s state-owned coal behemoth is heading to Pennsylvania to learn how to tap into natural gas embedded in shale. China Shenhua Energy Co., the world’s second largest coal company, is planning to create a joint venture between a U.S. subsidiary and a private Pennsylvania natural gas producer to drill 25 natural gas wells in the Marcellus Shale. The $146 million project — which is slated to produce 3.8 billion cubic meters of gas in three decades — is China Shenhua’s first foreign venture into shale gas, according to China Daily. China Shenhua said it aims to learn the trade and...

Hey, remember that one time — er, actually, those many times over the past four or five decades — that eco-”experts” were predicting that we were all teetering on the brink of a “peak oil” crisis, the likes of which would throw the entire world into a state of perpetual famine and war over sating our gluttonous demand for the planet’s ever-shrinking oil reserves? As entertaining as that particular brand of determined Malthusian fear-mongering can be, we have somehow managed to sail right on past all of the proffered deadlines for those imagined doomsday scenarios. Indeed, largely thanks to innovations...

There was an important study released by the Post Carbon Institute last week that gives us an insight into how long our great shale oil bonanza —or more likely, bubble— is going to last. As you might suspect, the thrust of the new report is bad news so we are unlikely to ever read much about it in the mainstream media, which continues to tell us about the bright energy-rich future ahead. By now we should all know about the technological wonder of “fracking” that has raised America’s oil production by over 2 million barrels a day (b/d) in the...

U.S. oil production is on track to reach a near historic high by 2016, before leveling off and eventually beginning to taper in 2020, according to a new federal forecast. The nation’s crude output will crest at 9.5 million barrels per day in 2016, according to the U.S. Energy Information Administration’s latest annual energy outlook, released Monday. The United States hit its peak oil production in 1970, with 9.6 million barrels of crude harvested daily. Advancements in oil field technology — particularly the combination of horizontal drilling and hydraulic fracturing, or fracking — have helped reverse years of declining oil...

To the Editor: RE: "God Will Help Us Fight for Our Lives Against Fracking Threat" (The NEWS, Dec. 9). Readers of The Athens NEWS need to know that hydraulic fracturing and protecting the environment are not mutually exclusive. While shale development is only a few years old in Ohio, we have been utilizing hydraulic fracturing as a completion technique for over 60 years in this state. During that time, there has not been a single confirmed case of groundwater contamination. This fact has been repeated by regulators across the United States, as well as current Department of Energy Secretary Ernest...

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...