From: The National
The development of unconventional gas resources in the Middle East is gathering pace, as Algeria closes in on agreements with international oil companies to explore its shale gas potential.
The country is in advanced talks with ExxonMobil and Royal Dutch Shell over shale gas exploration, said the head of Sonatrach, Algeria’s national oil company.
“We are in talks with Shell and Exxon,” Abdelhamid Zerguine, the chief executive told a news conference last week.
By Brandon Loomis
First Published Jun 26 2012 05:56 pm • Last Updated Jun 26 2012 07:00 pm
An environmental appeal of a Utah company’s permit to mine oil shale in the Uinta Basin is on hold — along with the permit approval — after state and company officials agreed to wait for more analysis, according to an attorney for the eco-group Living Rivers.
Red Leaf Resources won a permit this year from the Utah Division of Oil, Gas and Mining despite Living Rivers’ objections that the agency should wait for reports from the Division of Water Quality.
From: PR Log
Drilling permits in the Granite Wash play have been on the increase as production levels continue to soar, states a new report by energy specialists GlobalData.
According to the report*, the Texas portion of the play has rewarded oil and gas companies such as Chesapeake Energy and Forest Oil Corporation with high quality liquids in return for their endeavors in the area.
The Granite Wash play (Texas) has emerged as one of this fastest growing liquid plays with an approximate 33.3% boost in production from 2009 to 2010. Crude oil grew by 12.7, from 1.37 MMboe (Million Barrels of Oil Equivalent) in 2009 to 1.54 MMboe in 2010, whereas condensates grew from 2.69 MMboe in 2009 to 3.86 MMboe in 2010 – an increase of 43.7%.
From: The Wall Street Journal
Peak oil enthusiasts have had a rough few years. When the price of oil was racing towards its all-time peak in the feverish summer of 2008, Malthusianism was all the rage — even the usually unruffled International Energy Agency seemed to be worried that supply couldn’t keep up with demand.
The collapse of Lehman Brothers a few months after that kicked off a sharp correction in oil prices. But they bottomed out at around $40 a barrel and then resumed their climb, breaking back above $100 as the Arab Spring gathered steam in 2011.
Anton R. Dammer, the former Director of Naval Petroleum and Oil Shale Reserves in the Department of Energy testified a few months ago on the progress of oil shale development in the United States. Mr Dammer concluded in his testimony:
“The United States is in no better shape with regard to oil independence then we were at the time that EPACT 05 passed and worse than at the time of the Arab Oil Embargo of the 70’s. We are grateful for a strong and reliable trading partner to our North but we are still dependent on the import of close to half our daily oil requirements. We still consume roughly a quarter of the world’s oil supply and we remain reliant on an increasingly unstable and often hostile world oil market for our energy security.
Open-government advocates are correct when they say Utah ran afoul of the state’s open-meetings law during a March 27 strategy session about oil-shale development.
Editor’s Note: The story posted below is another example of the failure to rely on scientific data when assessing oil shale’s impact on water quantity. Please refer to the CRE’s analysis on the nexus between water and oil shale below, as provided in the CRE’s comment to BLM on the oil shale PEIS:
From: Bloomberg Businessweek
A small company that holds a federal lease to extract petroleum from oil shale reserves in western Colorado is taking a new approach to withdrawing crude oil from solid rock — one that it hopes will avoid groundwater contamination.
The process is “basically the same as steaming vegetables,” said Alan Burnham, chief technology officer for Rifle, Colo.-based American Shale Oil LLC.
Within weeks, the company will send a pool of oil down a well and blast it with hot fuel gas. The boiling oil will heat up an underground zone about 50 feet wide and 50 feet deep to more than 600 degrees.
From: Reuters
OPEC oil producers are not worried about the shale revolution. They might need to re-run their numbers.
The United States imported 4.5 million barrels a day of OPEC crude last year, 20 percent of the cartel’s exports and about half the country’s import needs.
But thanks to new technologies like hydraulic fracturing now sucking away on North American soil, the continent is already self sufficient in natural gas, and is eyeing an even bigger landmark — OPEC-free oil supplies.
Attached is a letter from CRE to the Bureau of Land Management discussing the agency’s compliance with BLM, DOI and OMB open government/transparency guidelines.
I am writing to bring to your attention a violation of the Open Government and Transparency Initiative championed by the White House and implemented by the agencies through guidance from the Office of Management and Budget (OMB). Specifically, the Bureau of Land Management (BLM) is refusing to release to the public the public’s own comments on the agency’s draft Programmatic Environmental Impact Statement (PEIS) for Oil Shale. BLM requested public comments on the draft document in a Federal Register notice on February 6, 2012.