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Shell announced today that it has declared force majeure on its unconventional gas exploration activities in eastern Ukraine, near the site where flight MH17 crashed. However, it's too early to tell what impact the latest round of EU and US sanctions on Russia for its actions in Ukraine will have on the Anglo-Dutch major, sources said. Shell has been engaging in shale gas exploration in Ukraine and its Russian assets include a stake in Sakhalin-2, one of the largest LNG projects in the world, where it is working with Gazprom to expand the project. Shell CEO Ben van Beurden was...

Energy companies currently leave about 95 percent of the crude in the ground at today’s unconventional oil wells, but they face major technological challenges in boosting recovery rates, a Schlumberger scientist said Tuesday. Robert Kleinberg, a fellow with the oilfield services firm, bemoaned the current 5 percent recovery factor at tight oil wells, where crude is pulled from the pores of extremely dense rock formations. Geologists and engineers are actively looking for ways to boost the figure, but traditional methods applied at more conventional oil wells — such as pumping steam underground and flooding the formations with water — don’t...

People will be more likely to support fracking if they have a direct commercial interest in the extraction of shale oil and gas beneath their land, Mayor of London says. British households should be given ownership of the oil and gas beneath their homes so that they have a commercial interest in supporting fracking, Boris Johnson has said. The Mayor of London said that the law should be changed so that “mineral rights” belonged to the landowner, rather than the Crown. Currently, the Government grants licences to companies to explore for and produce oil and gas, while the owners of...

Motley Fool: The World Has 53.3 Years of Oil Left By Matt DiLallo | More Articles |  June 22, 2014 |   Photo credit: BP. BP (NYSE: BP  )  has provided an intriguing update to its global oil reserves estimate in the company's latest yearly review of energy statistics. BP raised its reserve estimate by 1.1% to 1,687.9 billion barrels, which is enough oil to last the world 53.3 years at the current production rates. However, there's likely a lot more oil left in the tank beyond what BP sees today. America's energy boom surgesA good portion of the growth in global oil reserves in BP's report comes from the...

The cliffs at Kimmeridge, on England's south coast, have on occasions been known to smoulder or even burst into flames in hot weather. That is because, unlike the famous white chalk cliffs of Dover, they are made of oil shale, a soft rock that has hydrocarbons trapped in its pores. The world's oil-shale beds may contain the equivalent of up to nine times as much oil as all of its conventional wells.

To grasp the difficulties Mexico faces in capitalizing on a North American shale boom, just wander into the dusty landscape due south of the U.S. border. On one side of the fence, thousands of wells work around the clock in Texas to produce record volumes of shale oil and gas, transforming towns like Carrizo Springs in a modern-day gold rush. On the other side, violent drug cartels roam above untapped shale riches, leaving behind a trail of blood. The relatively few conventional wells operated by state oil giant Pemex and its contractors close down overnight as a security precaution. But...

Industry interest and activity in shale reservoirs continues to escalate. The big headline-makers, such as the Barnett, Haynesville, Marcellus, comprise only some chapters of the big story. The less familiar names also are beginning to make their mark. Count the Cane Creek shale in the Pennsylvanian-age Paradox formation in the Paradox Basin in southeast Utah among those receiving considerable attention. "The Cane Creek is a transgressive-regressive sequence in the lower portion of the Paradox," said AAPG member Stephanie Carney, geologist at the Utah Geological Survey (UGS). "It's tens of feet to nearly 200 feet thick, over-and underlain by salt beds,"...

Here is America's Next Great Shale Play By Matt DiLallo | More Articles | Save For Later June 1, 2014 | Comments (0)   Photo credit: Chesapeake Energy  Chesapeake Energy  (NYSE: CHK  )  recently held its annual investor day. Among the many topics the company discussed was its emerging position in the Powder River Basin in the Rocky Mountains, which it sees becoming a world-class asset. That enthusiasm isn't just being conveyed by Chesapeake Energy. Earlier this year, EOG Resources  (NYSE: EOG  )  announced that it was adding four new Rocky Mountain oil plays to its drilling inventory while Devon Energy  (NYSE: DVN  )  noted that it was drilling...

Logistics operations drive by the shale energy boom employed 32,000 workers in 2012, a figure which is expected to grow by over 26,000 jobs, or 82 percent, to more than 58,000 jobs in 2025. America’s shale energy revolution is creating and sustaining hundreds of thousands of jobs in diverse sectors of the economy that supply construction, equipment, supplies and services to shale energy operations, and it is making the U.S. manufacturing sector more competitive by reducing energy costs, the president and CEO of Energy Equipment and Infrastructure Alliance (EEIA), Toby Mack, told Congress May 20. Testifying at a House Energy...

For the past several years, the Permian Basin remained an area where vertical drilling was still the principle method of extraction, even as horizontal drilling and hydraulic fracturing become ubiquitous in the Eagle Ford Shale, the Bakken, and other shale plays in the United States. However, horizontal drilling is on the rise in the Permian Basin, as well, according to new data by the Energy Information Administration (EIA). Horizontal drilling began to increase in the Permian Basin early in 2013, the EIA said. By the end of 2013, oil extraction in the Permian accounted for half of the total increase...

The great hype surrounding the advent of a shale gas bonanza in California may turn out to be just that: hype. The U.S. Energy Information Administration (EIA) - the statistical arm of the Department of Energy - has downgraded its estimate of the total amount of recoverable oil in the Monterey Shale by a whopping 96 percent. Its previous estimate pegged the recoverable resource in California's shale formation at 13.7 billion barrels but it now only thinks that there are 600 million barrels available. The estimate is expected to be made public in June. The sharply downgraded numbers come amid...

Federal energy authorities have slashed by 96% the estimated amount of recoverable oil buried in California's vast Monterey Shale deposits, deflating its potential as a national "black gold mine" of petroleum. Just 600 million barrels of oil can be extracted with existing technology, far below the 13.7 billion barrels once thought recoverable from the jumbled layers of subterranean rock spread across much of Central California, the U.S. Energy Information Administration said. The new estimate, expected to be released publicly next month, is a blow to the nation's oil future and to projections that an oil boom would bring as many...

OPEC Secretary-General Abdalla el-Badri said oil supplies from North America “will play an important role in the coming few years,” but he cast doubt on their sustainability over the long term. Speaking May 15 in Moscow, el-Badri acknowledged that oil supply from producers outside of OPEC are expected to increase by more than 4 million barrels per day (bpd) between 2013 and 2018, with much of that coming from North America. But he cautioned that the addition of non-OPEC oil supplies to the global market “should be viewed as a periodic shift." "Tight oil adds depth and diversity to the...

Oil production will continue to soar in the six major U.S. shale plays, with more barrels pumped per rig, according to federal projections released Monday. Total oil production in the six regions is expected to grow to 4.43 million barrels per day in June, an increase of 75,000 barrels per day compared to May, according to the U.S. Energy Information Administration. The federal agency expects oil rigs will produce an average of 271 barrels per day each, an increase of one barrel over May. The projection reflects the growing efficiency of rigs since the U.S. energy boom began. In June...

The economy has been underperforming for over five years now. It's easy to worry that this unsettling trend might go on forever. Well, don't worry. Because shale gas will probably change everything. Last year, the U.S. bested Russia to become the world's biggest exporter of natural gas, thanks largely to shale gas. President Obama celebrated the moment by saying that the United States is the "Saudi Arabia of natural gas." It later turned out that the United States is also the Saudi Arabia of...oil, with its oil production scheduled to overtake Saudi Arabia's by 2015. That's next year. It's unclear...

South Texas communities seem to have come to the same conclusion: The Eagle Ford is here and they’ll be dealing with it for the long term. Although no one anticipated the oil boom or was able to plan for it, communities have started devoting more money to long-term planning. McMullen County Judge James Teal joked this week at the Eagle Ford Consortium’s annual conference that if he had known the Eagle Ford would have been so big, he would have “probably kept my job in oil and gas.” But given the historic boom-bust cycle in Texas, Teal and other officials...

he economy is tough, especially if you have a liberal arts degree, writes Ohio Treasurer Josh Mandel. While liberal arts majors are forced to take low-paying jobs, pipeline welders are making six figures thanks to the country’s oil and gas boom. “Too many young people have four-year liberal-arts degrees, are thousands of dollars in debt and find themselves serving coffee at Starbucks or working part-time at the mall,” Mandel wrote in the Wall Street Journal. “Many of them would have been better off with a two-year skilled-trade or technical education that provides the skills to secure a well-paying job.”“A good...

EU energy commissioner Günther Oettinger has urged Germany to make use of shale gas options and added that the he saw no danger of Europe’s access to Russian gas falling victim to possible economic sanctions in the standoff over Ukraine. […] “I am against scaling back or even cutting our gas links with Russia in the coming years,” the commissioner said. “But we must pursue our strategy of diversification. […] I would also urgently press Germany to make use of the shale gas option and allow fracking projects.” …

SHAFTER, Calif. — A bustling city is sprouting on five acres here, carved out of a vast almond grove. Tanker trucks and heavy equipment come and go, a row of office trailers runs the length of the site and an imposing 150-foot drilling rig illuminated by football-field-like lights rises over the trees. It's all been hustled into service to solve a tantalizing riddle: how to tap into the largest oil shale reservoir in the United States. Across the southern San Joaquin Valley, oil exploration sites have popped up in agricultural fields and on government land, driven by the hope that...

Despite major accidents in the past year, U.S. oil companies must keep using the nation’s railroads to move crude to markets while they build a much more extensive pipeline network, an energy economics professor said Tuesday. Oil refineries on the East Coast have virtually no access to the light, sweet crude extracted in Texas’ surging oil fields because there are no pipelines to carry the oil there. It is generally too expensive to ship the crude from the Gulf Coast to buyers in the northeastern U.S. because of quirks in century-old laws, forcing refineries in New Jersey to buy oil...