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Lift ‘reckless’ oil drilling ban, Gulf residents plead

Richard — Tue, 27 Jul 2010 22:31:20 +0000

President Barack Obama’s “reckless” moratorium on deepwater drilling in the Gulf of Mexico is suffocating small businesses and destroying livelihoods, lawmakers and residents said Tuesday.

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Latest Drilling Report for Shelby County Texas

Richard — Mon, 21 Jun 2010 00:52:40 +0000

Shelby County Texas completed drilling activity for June 20, 2010:

Unit Petroleum has completed two new wells in Shelby County. The R. Kidd Well No. 1 Continue with Shelby County Drilling Report

Alaskan and southern senators push Salazar, Obama to lift ban on new shallow-water oil drilling permits

Deckhand — Sun, 23 May 2010 16:38:43 +0000

Senators from Alaska and four states bordering the Gulf of Mexico are urging the White House to lift its moratorium on new oil drilling permits for rigs placed in shallow water.In a letter sent Friday to Interior Secretary Ken Salazar…

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New Regulations Worry Colorado Drillers

Deckhand — Sun, 24 Jan 2010 19:02:25 +0000

Colorado has had nine months now to live with new oil and natural gas drilling regulations that dramatically changed the permitting process for drillers, but they couldn’t have come at a worse time.

A recent Greeley Times article continues…

While drillers and other industry insiders worked to meet new environmental requirements in oil and gas permitting, the market may as well have pulled the rug from beneath them. Natural gas prices plunged, while oil prices have only slowly crept up from record lows.

The result was a massive slowdown of oil and gas drilling and permitting across the state in 2009. Much of that slowdown has occurred in Weld County, which has affected regional employment and will seriously impact government revenues when that production is taxed.

Some continue to call for systematic change in the regulations, while those who helped implement the new rules say the problems already are working themselves out because the market is improving.

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Oil Field Jobs Up In Alaska

Deckhand — Sat, 23 Jan 2010 09:20:38 +0000

Alaska State Revenue Commissioner Pat Galvin wrote a letter today to legislators interested in lowering oil taxes, telling them oil industry jobs and investment in Alaska are up but drilling activity has been down.

Galvin’s letter was a response to questions posed by 15 state representatives in early December. The legislators said they were worried the ACES oil tax system the Legislature put in place in 2007 was “doing more harm than good.”

They wanted statistics on oil and gas activity and employment since the tax passed.

Galvin wrote back today that the state had its highest industry employment in history in 2008, with 12,800 jobs and annual average earnings of $113,541. The 2009 numbers are preliminary, he said, but are expected to be even higher.

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Companies Must Commit To Oil Field Jobs In Alaska

Deckhand — Thu, 21 Jan 2010 06:37:29 +0000

Alaska Gov. Sean Parnell says he doesn’t support giving tax breaks to oil and gas companies without commitments that the companies will invest — and create oil field jobs — in the state.

The comments came in his first State of the State address Wednesday.

He has proposed greater incentives for companies, including expanding tax credits for drilling and well work costs, as a way to spur additional development. He’s said the estimated hundreds of millions of dollars in additional credits are a small price to pay for the jobs and opportunities they’d create.

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Oil Drilling Continues In Gulf of Mexico

Deckhand — Thu, 21 Jan 2010 00:12:00 +0000

In March of last year, The New York Times declared that “the great American drilling boom is over.”

Here’s the key sentence from the Times’ analysis of the U.S. energy industry: “Lower prices are bringing to an end an ambitious effort to squeeze more oil from aging fields and to tap new sources of natural gas.”

Now, let’s fast-forward to last week, when a New Orleans-based energy company announced it had drilled 28,000 feet beneath the floor of the Gulf of Mexico and discovered one of the largest shallow-water fields in recent decades. Experts believe the field, which is located in an area that was thought to have been tapped out, contains more than 1 trillion cubic feet of natural gas.

Despite reports of its demise, the dead dinosaur business may hold the key to the nation’s energy future for the next 30 to 40 years.

That’s good news for the central Gulf Coast. Mobile, Pascagoula, New Orleans and other cities in the region stand to benefit economically from the deepwater exploration. New drilling will spur the expansion of natural gas facilites and other energy-related industries, creating jobs and capital investment.

So, thanks to the ingenuity of the often-derided energy industry, the “drilling boom” isn’t over — not by a long shot.

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2009 Big Year For Larimer County Oil Industry

Deckhand — Wed, 20 Jan 2010 23:27:01 +0000

The oil and gas industry isn’t big in Larimer County, but 2009 proved to be its third most active year here.

And, despite concerns from the industry that new state oil and gas permitting rules are hitting the industry hard in northeast Colorado, 2009 was also the third most active year for the industry in Weld County, one of the state’s fossil fuel hotspots.

The Colorado Oil and Gas Conservation Commission issued 12 oil and gas drilling permits for Larimer County in 2009, down from 46 in 2008. Most of those permits were issued for wells located near Berthoud.

The only other year Larimer County exceeded 12 drilling permit approvals was 1992, when the county saw 13.

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Ohio Township Looks To Oil and Gas Opportunities

Deckhand — Wed, 20 Jan 2010 23:22:47 +0000

Herb Breymaier’s grandfather drilled a gas well on the family farm in northern Granville Township more than 100 years ago. The well furnished gas to him and Herb’s father until about 1940, when it began to dry up.

For 60 years, the subterranean deposits stayed undisturbed while the low price of oil and natural gas put a damper on exploration in Ohio. But a year-and-half ago, Breymaier, a retired farmer, got a knock on the door from Flint Ridge Energy, a Newark oil exploration and leasing firm that has launched a major exploration initiative in northern Granville Township.

After what FRE vice president for exploration Gary Sitler characterized as a period of trust building, Breymaier signed a lease that allows the company rights to the oil and natural gas on the property.

Sitler said there is no surefire way to predict the productivity of the new well — drilled last March in the middle of a 500-acre farm field –but he is optimistic based on the geological data that the well will be a big producer, possibly of both oil and gas.

“The information we have is that we think this will be a very good well,” he said.

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Oil and Gas Operators Oppose New Tax on Gas Production

Deckhand — Tue, 19 Jan 2010 23:08:24 +0000

The Independent Oil & Gas Association of New York is voicing opposition to a proposal by the Paterson Administration to impose a “severance tax” on oil and natural gas production in New York State.

Governor Paterson is proposing a 3-percent severance tax on the market value of natural gas harvested – or severed – from a gas pool in the Marcellus or Utica Shale formations. The tax would apply to horizontal wells, which have the potential to produce greater volumes of natural gas. There is already a production tax on the existing 14,000 wells in New York that are producing natural gas – through a real property tax assessment – which primarily stays in local communities, so an additional tax is unnecessary.

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