International News for oil and gas professionals
The question of who is authorized to evaluate petroleum properties in a state cropped up in Texas last year because of an opinion held by the Texas Board of Professional Engineers (TBPE) that said evaluation engineers holding professional engineering licenses from states other than Texas were not authorized under Texas law to evaluate resources in the Texas subsurface.
Representatives of the US oil and gas industry should greet the new budget supercommittee in Congress with a preemptive offer.
US Environmental Protection Agency Administrator Lisa P. Jackson recently exercised her discretionary authority to reject proposed secondary standards for nitrogen and sulfur oxides.
Government investigations into tight shale gas production have taken a new direction with the US Securities and Exchange Commission's apparent launch of an inquiry into producers' developed and producing wells and reserves estimates.
The US Bureau of Ocean Energy Management, Regulation, and Enforcement will hold the first Gulf of Mexico federal offshore oil and gas lease sale since the 2010 Macondo well accident and crude oil spill on Dec. 14 in New Orleans.
Large service companies seeking new technologies and markets are expected to drive active merger and acquisition activity among service contractors and equipment suppliers this year, although activity has slowed since the first quarter, Deloitte LLP said its midyear Oil & Gas Mergers and Acquisitions report.
Oil and wet gas plays of all types are revitalizing basins, reducing unemployment, stressing demand for rigs and other services, and reversing production declines in the US onshore Lower 48, speakers said Wednesday at a session leading up to the Summer NAPE exposition in Houston.
The Middle Devonian Marcellus shale in the US Appalachian basin contains 84 tcf of gas and 3.4 billion bbl of natural gas liquids, the US Geological Survey said Aug. 23.
Motor gasoline demand in the US reached a low for any July over the past decade, according to the latest monthly statistics from the American Petroleum Institute.
Libyan rebels said they took control of the 120,000 b/d oil refinery in the western town of Zawiyah even as additional supplies of imported oil products are now reaching other rebel-held areas of the country.
US President Barack Obama Aug. 18 signed an Executive Order imposing additional sanctions against Syria's government, freezing any of its assets in the US, and banning the import into the US of petroleum or petroleum products of Syrian origin.
Even as rebel forces last week were sweeping into Libya's capital of Tripoli, speculation was mounting in the international oil and gas industry about just when the North African country might resume oil exports.
Saudi Aramco, which last year accepted oil storage space in Okinawa from the Japanese government, will this month begin to send shipments of oil stored in Japan to the US West Coast.
The West Virginia Department of Environmental Protection has issued an emergency rule to increase regulatory oversight of unconventional natural gas drilling.
The Obama administration's view of government spending and jobs gets weirder with time. Now its luminaries are touting the job-creating goodness of food stamps.
