Guest notes on the Atlantic City OCS meeting

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With the DOI public hearings on offshore energy production wrapping up today in San Francisco, we’re now taking a look back at an account from IPAA member Skip Hobbs who testified at the OCS hearing in Atlantic City last week.  If anyone else attended the meetings in Atlantic City, New Orleans, Anchorage, or San Francisco and would like to share your thoughts, please feel free to comment here or submit them to bbradley@ipaa.org.

So withour further ado…

Notes and Comments from G. Warfield “Skip” Hobbs regarding the…….

MINERALS MANAGEMENT SERVICE
REGIONAL OCS MEETINGS – NORTH ATLANTIC

April 6, 2009
Atlantic City, New Jersey

Skip Hobbs

This was the first of four regional meetings concerning the 5-Year Plan for the Federal OCS. The hearing was chaired by Secretary of the Interior Ken Salazar; with Brenda Pierce, Energy Resources Program Coordinator, US Geological Survey; and Robert LaBelle, Deputy Assistant Director, Minerals Management Service. Government officials who were present and delivered prepared statements included:  New Jersey Governor Jon Corzine (D); Rhode Island Governor, Don Carcieri (R); Sen. Robert Menendez (D-NJ); Rep. Frank Pallone, Jr. (D-NJ); Rep. Rush Holt (D-NJ); Rep. Frank LoBiondo (R-NJ),; Rep Bob Bishop (R-UT). Government officials were also present, and later spoke, from Maine, Massachusetts, and New York.

The meeting was held in a conference room of the Atlantic City Convention Center, and was attended by – a rough estimate of perhaps 250 people.  Nobody wore name tags, so it was difficult to say who was there.  Many environmental groups were evident by the buttons they wore. Continue reading →

Oh Canada!

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...or at least it knows how to drill into rocks.

“The age of the engineer has come,” says Pat Carlson, chief executive of Seven Generations Energy Ltd., an independent natural gas company operating in Canada.  And he’s right.

New technologies — and the petroleum engineers who deploy them — are making previously uneconomic drilling projects more affordable.  And that’s good news for North America. On the last AccessDirect post, Ryan wrote about a new Energy Department study, prepared by the Groundwater Protection Council, that looks at some of these drilling technologies, such as hydraulic fracturing, and their effectiveness at protecting the environment while producing natural gas from tight geologic formations. The Canadians have embraced these American-bred technologies. 

Canada’s Financial Post newspaper tells the story of former IPAA member George Mitchell’s achievements and how they’re working in the Great North:

Resource plays started captivating the sector after Texas oilman George P. Mitchell pioneered production of natural gas from shales in the Barnett formation around Fort Worth, Texas, using fracture-stimulation technology — a process in which sand and water are pumped at high pressure into a well to crack open reservoir rock, releasing gas.

Through trial and error by producers and drillers, the technology evolved rapidly and is continuing to change. It now involves drilling horizontal wells and fracture stimulating them at certain intervals.

 The result: reservoirs that offered marginal production or nothing at all using conventional methods are suddenly coming to life using the new techniques. 

This story is worth a read.  Click here.