International news for oil and gas professionals
Your Jan. 7 issue contained two valuable items on global warming and the Keystone XL pipeline (OGJ, Jan. 7, p. 22; p. 24). They touch on some important truths, but it would be beneficial to take them a step further.
Could Ukraine actually reduce its dependence on Russian gas by exploiting its considerable shale gas resources?
Executive Branch activism took a punch to the gut in a Jan. 25 court ruling calling on the US Environmental Protection Agency to accommodate rules to reality. What's needed now is a knockout blow to the law that made EPA's mischief possible.
Forecasts of global demand for oil, always sensitive to economic fate, weather, and geopolitical surprise, are especially fragile this year. Economic growth depends extraordinarily much on another wild variable: politics.
The fatal 4-day siege at the In Amenas gas production plant in eastern Algeria near the Libyan border that left 81 people dead "heightens concerns over protecting infrastructure in remote areas—a key factor for the planned $20 billion Trans-Saharan Gas Pipeline as well as other long-distance international energy infrastructure linking Africa, the Middle East, Central Asia, and Europe," said analysts at KBC Market Services, a division of KBC Process Technology Ltd. in Surrey, UK.
More US oil and gas associations are expanding their federal advocacy efforts beyond Congress and the Obama administration. Washington staff members still plan to brief new House and Senate members and their staffs and keep in touch with federal regulators as 2013 gets under way.
Planned pipeline construction to be completed in 2013 jumped 73% from the previous year, with sharply higher levels of planned crude and products pipelines more than countering somewhat softer natural gas pipeline construction plans.
US independents, particularly Devon Energy Corp. and Apache Corp., are examining the potential of the Cline shale oil play in the Midland basin.
The oil and gas mergers and acquisitions market is expected to remain resilient during 2013 even though many geopolitical and economic uncertainties from 2012 continue, said an M&A report that Ernst & Young released from its London office Jan. 24.
About one third of the worldwide supply of crude oil costs less than $10/bbl to produce, and nearly 90% costs less than $20/bbl, according to a study arguing that production costs don't explain recent crude-price increases.
It's widely recognized that more natural gas will be used to generate electricity in the US. Accomplishing this won't necessarily be easy, however. The devil, as always, is in the details.
The composition of China's new Politburo and its members' views about large, state-owned enterprises (SOEs) have profound implications for the country's socioeconomic trajectory in general and for the energy industry in particular.
China has begun the annual national oil and gas resources assessment after China's National Petroleum Assessment 2007.
A group led by Petrodorado Energy Ltd., Toronto, plans to drill a new wellbore to evaluate "a younger and exceptionally thick sand-prone sequence" that has never previously been reported in Colombia's Upper Magdalena basin.
Casing wear is an increasingly typical problem that leads to a decrease in collapse resistance in deep wells, ultradeep wells, horizontal wells, and extended reach wells.
Statoil late last year published an update to its 2010 assay of Aasgard Blend (OGJ, Apr. 4, 2011, p. 94). To the existing blend from Smorbukk, Smorbukk South, Midgard, Mikkel, Kristin, and Yttergryta fields, the update added production analysis for Morvin field.
This second, concluding article discusses the impact of fines in delayed-coker feedstocks and the steps that can improve reliability and profitability of the coking operation.
