Table of Contents

International news for oil and gas professionals

OGJ's annual list of major upstream megaprojects contains ventures in four more countries than it did in 2011.

Natural gas and oil from unconventional resource plays, rightly characterized as "revolutionary," will supplement but not necessarily dominate a market for transportation fuel that is likely to remain subject to long-term diversification.

Chesapeake Energy Corp. and most other companies having stakes in Ohio's Utica shale say they remain optimistic about the emerging play's potential, but one company, EnerVest Ltd., has said it wants to sell some of its Utica holdings.

ExxonMobil Corp. agreed to buy Bakken formation assets in North Dakota and Montana covering 196,000 net acres from Denbury Resources Inc. for $1.6 billion.

US Sen. John Hoeven (R-ND) said he will introduce a bill, the Empower States Act, to ensure that states remain primary regulators of hydraulic fracturing and similar oil and gas activities.

Former Wyoming Gov. Dave Freduenthal (D) urged the two major parties' presidential nominees to more specifically outline their energy policy plans if they win the 2012 election.

At the heart of the Marcellus shale natural gas development debate in Pennsylvania lies a basic question that John H. Quigley feels hasn't been satisfactorily answered: Does gas drilling make people sick?

US Sens. Kent Conrad (D-ND), Mike Enzi (R-Wyo.), and Jay Rockefeller (D-W.Va.) introduced a bill on Sept. 20 designed to expand the use of carbon dioxide for enhanced oil recovery. S. 3581 would modify a federal carbon capture and storage tax incentive that provides a $10/ton credit for CO₂ used in EOR and $20/ton for CO₂ placed directly into secure geological storage.

Four US House Energy and Commerce Committee members—Republicans Pete Olson (Tex.) and Marsha Blackburn (Tenn.) and Democrats Gene Green (Tex.) and Jim Matheson (Utah)—introduced a bill designed to eliminate fraud in the federal Renewable Fuel Standard's biodiesel program.

Western-led sanctions against Iran's oil exports aiming to push Tehran to return to negotiations on uranium enrichment have displaced from the market more than 1 million b/d of crude oil, distorting market fundamentals and affecting prices, according to the Centre for Global Economic Studies (CGES), London.

US petroleum deliveries, a measure of demand, decreased by 4.3% in August from a year earlier to 18.6 million b/d, according to the latest monthly statistics from American Petroleum Institute.

Global LPG trade, generally supply-driven in the past and likely to continue to be, is nonetheless seeing sharp changes in its dynamics, according to a report recently compiled by FACTS Global Energy, Honolulu.

This is the third of three parts on the potential of domestic unconventional shale oil and gas production to displace oil imports to the US.

This article highlights results from an OGJ Executive Report on oil and gas activity in Louisiana.

A number of fields in Egypt are expected to undergo one or more enhanced oil recovery methods in the near future. This article summarizes an investigation on the applicability of EOR methods in Egyptian fields.

US refining industry's compliance with the current Renewable Fuels Standard (RFS) appears impossible in the near future and could result in massive fines by the US Environmental Protection Agency.

Reid vapor pressure (rvp) blending values of non-aromatic hydrocarbons increase with the aromatic content of the gasoline, an aromatic effect.

This final of three articles that present selections from the 2011 American Fuel & Petrochemical Manufacturers Q&A and Technology Forum (Oct. 9-12; San Antonio) highlights crude oil processing.

Costs for the five equipment items that make up the Nelson-Farrar miscellaneous equipment cost index were mixed during 2010-11. The miscellaneous equipment index average rose to 1,285.0 from 1,219.4 in the time period measured.

Construction of an Alaska in-state natural gas pipeline is feasible at any of three flow rate scenarios: 500 MMcfd, 750 MMcfd, and 1,000 MMcfd. Selection of a particular rate depends on specific conditions and perspectives, but the results of the study underlying this article show that building an Alaska in-state gas pipeline is reasonable for all three, assuming a 30-year operating life.

Researchers derived five corrosion rate distributions from different pit growth models and used them to perform reliability analyses of underground pipelines from synthetic and real-life data.