Knowledge Base

The Mine Safety and Health Administration (MSHA) proposes to amend its existing standards to better protect miners against occupational exposure to respirable crystalline silica, a carcinogenic hazard, and to improve respiratory protection for all airborne hazards.

Southwestern Energy and Chesapeake Energy are close to a merger that would create a roughly $17 billion company ranking as one of the largest natural-gas producers in the U.S. 

The U.S. exported more natural gas in the first six months of 2023 than in any other previous six-month period, the U.S. Energy Information Agency reported.

Tesla CEO Elon Musk isn’t against entrepreneurs creating apps for smartphones, but he wishes more of them would focus on heavy industry—where he says the opportunities are “tremendous.”

The increasing demand for oil, driven by individual and industrial use, transportation fuel, and natural gas exploration, necessitates the use of proppants like frac sand in the petroleum industry

Despite the Biden administration’s pause on LNG export facilities, the U.S. took the spot as global LNG exporter in 2023, overtaking Australia, Qatar and Russia, according to the International Gas Union

(HARTENERGY)

Freeport is the United States' second-largest LNG exporter and one of the most-watched U.S. LNG export plants in the world because it has a history of swaying global gas prices when it shuts and restarts. The U.S. is the world's largest exporter of the superchilled gas.
(Reuters)

In an application filed with the Public Utility Commission of Texas, Entergy is seeking to build the 754-megawatt Legend Power Station and the 453-megawatt Lone Star Power Station. (newsbreak.com)

Venture Global’s Plaquemines LNG has started receiving natural gas, marking a milestone for the project under construction in southeastern Louisiana and a reminder of new demand ahead in 2024.

Posted by: East Daley Analytics

Industry stakeholders have heard of MSHA’s plans for a new rule regulating Respirable Crystalline Silica (“RCS”) exposure in the mining industry for more than a decade, and across three presidential administrations if not longer. What MSHA published today is unsurprisingly similar to what stakeholders expected in 2016 when momentum was building for MSHA to adopt the Occupational Safety & Health Administration’s (“OSHA”) new (at that time) RCS standard, although there are some notable differences. (mshadefensereport.com)

mshadefensereport.com

More money for the energy transition isn’t meaningfully moving how energy is being produced and fossile fuels will continue to dominate, Liberty Energy Chairman and CEO Christ Wright said. (hartenergy.com)

DENVER—The U.S. shale industry consumed aan estimated 112 million tons of proppant in 2022. Transporting that volume required more than 4.5 million truckloads, and is equivalent to the gross weight of 472 of the largest cruise ships ever built. Assuming every one of those truck and trailer combinations spanned an average of 50 feet, lining them up from bumper to bumper would stretch that convoy some 42,600 miles, or from Midland to Anchorage, Ak., 11 times over. (agor.com)

French shipping giant CMA CGM has decided to switch a recent order it placed in China for eight methanol-powered containerships to LNG fuel, according to shipbuilding sources. (LNGPrime)

The United States is set to add a total of 8.6 gigawatts (GW) of natural gas-fired electric generating capacity in 2023, more than the gas-fired additions in 2022 and 2021, the U.S. Energy Information Administration (EIA) said on Monday. - oilprice.com

Natural gas futures saw a significant uptick, hitting their highest levels since January 24. The market’s volatility is stoked by multiple factors: a sudden jump in crude oil prices due to Middle East tensions, renewed strike plans in Australia’s Chevron LNG facilities, and forecasts of cooler weather boosting demand in key areas. Last week’s lighter-than-expected storage report and weak production estimates also fanned the flames, pushing futures higher. - fxempire.com

Can Haynesville, Permian and Eagle Ford E&Ps meet skyrocketing gas demand to serve a host of new LNG projects on the Gulf Coast? These executives have concerns. - HartEnergy.com

As buyers search for cleaner sources of energy, a growing volume of natural gas
produced in the U.S. is being certified under responsibly sourced gas (RSG) standards.

Responsibly sourced gas (RSG), also called certified gas or differentiated gas, is natural
gas evaluated by third-party standards to determine its environmental and methane
intensity. (Source - hartenergy.com)

British Gas owner Centrica has signed a £6.2bn ($8bn) mega deal with US fossil fuel producer Delta Midstream, in a welcome boost for the UK’s power supplies.
The agreement IS for 1m tonnes per annum of liquefied natural gas (LNG) for 15 years, and means Centrica will take delivery of around 14 LNG cargoes per year. (Source - oilprice.com)

A consumer class action lawsuit filed Tuesday claims Delta Air Lines inaccurately billed itself as the world’s “first carbon-neutral airline” and should pay damages. The complaint in federal court in California alleges the airline relied on carbon offsets that were largely bogus. (Source - APNews)

The smart money turned out to be wrong, as reports from bell-weather OFS companies, Schlumberger, (NYSE:SLB), and Halliburton, (NYSE:HAL) turned in stellar quarters for Q-1, as did many 2nd tier OFS companies, and are guiding for a strong year. In this article, we will discuss why we believe the original thesis to still be valid, and why we feel it will begin to play out in 2023. But we do note, there is some bifurcation in the overall sector as we will discuss. While the top frackers may have a clear field to run, there is trouble ahead in the drilling category. At least for the short term, and we will provide commentary in that regard.

The U.S. Department of Labor has announced better enforcement on existing regs to protect mine works from respirable silica health risk and expressed their commitment to issuing a silica rule to enhance health protection of works. Expect dust-related min inspections and silica sampling in ALL US MINES! (Source)

(Natural Gas Intel) The first cargo has departed Freeport LNG since a June fire knocked the plant offline and a second has been loaded at the terminal, which has also asked federal regulators to move ahead with full commercial operations on the first phase of its restart plan….

(Natural Gas Intel) The U.S. natural gas market is expected to have a greater impact on the global LNG trade in the future as more projects are built and the world’s supply contracts are increasingly tied to Henry Hub, Shell plc reported Thursday in its annual liquefied natural gas outlook.

(Reuters) — U.S. oil and gas exploration and production company Chesapeake Energy Corp. said on Wednesday it had agreed to sell part of its operations in south Texas to private equity-owned WildFire Energy for $1.43 billion in cash.

Thanks to a mix of events, from the Russian invasion of Ukraine to the U.S. economic recovery, fossil fuels are showing resilience despite President Biden’s push to transition to clean energy and the industry’s own history of boom-bust investing and heavy reliance on debt… Read the rest of the story here

The CEO of a Deutsche Bank subsidiary resigned Wednesday, just a day after German authorities launched a heavy-handed raid on the company’s offices in Frankfurt over allegations of “greenwashing”.

A whistleblower claimed that DWS, a Deutsche Bank subsidiary managing some $900 billion in assets, misled investors in its 2020 annual report by claiming that more than $450 billion in its assets met environmental, social and governance (ESG) criteria. Deutsche Bank holds an 80% stake in DWS. (Oil Price)

The Wall Street Journal reported this week that oil and gas investment funds in the United States are seeing renewed interest from investors in the industry. One of these, Post Oil Energy Capital, told the WSJ’s Luis Garcia that “We see investors more interested in investing in our new funds going forward than we’ve seen in the last 18 to 24 months.”

Supply chain bottlenecks from workforce to frac sand and equipment are holding back a surge in America’s oil production, even as the White House has changed the tune in recent weeks and called on U.S. producers to increase output. Production is indeed growing, but not at a fast enough pace to offset losses of global supply elsewhere. Read more about this here.

The U.S. shale industry is racing to ramp up production, “but it won’t be quick.”

Frac sand is made of silica crystals processed from pure sandstone, with a small grain size and round shape that allows natural fluids like oil and water to pass between them. At a drilling site, sand is mixed with water and special chemicals, then injected into the ground at high pressure to break up shale to release and pump out the oil inside.

One of the key reasons actually predates the war in Ukraine: the special sand required for hydraulic fracturing (frac sand) in shale oil production has gotten a lot more expensive. (Business Insider)

The cost of hydraulic fracturing on a tight gas or oil well in North America is the single largest item in a well’s AFE and proppant delivered is the largest single component of the fracturing invoice. Wet sand handling technology is a key enabler of the next step of cost and emissions reductions in the proppant industry.

Wet Sand Technology — Investing for the Future

Recent NIOSH field studies identified overexposure to airborne silica as a health hazard to workers. Large quantities of silica sand are used during hydraulic fracturing. Sand is delivered via truck and then loaded into sand movers, where it is subsequently transferred via conveyer belt and blended with other hydraulic fracturing fluids prior
to high pressure injection into the drilling hole.

Transporting, moving, and refilling silica sand into and through sand movers, along transfer belts, and into blender hoppers can release dusts containing silica into the air. Workers can be exposed if they breathe the dust into their lungs.

Read OSHA’s harzard alert here.

Sand is mined. It is washed. It is dried. Then it gets wet again.

Such is the unassuming life cycle of most every grain of sand ever pumped down a horizontal well along with millions of gallons of water and into the freshly opened fractures of a tight-rock formation in the US.

But what if the sand never had to be dried?
Source.

Water management solutions are increasingly in demand across the modern aggregates production world, with water being a valuable global resource. MWS have used their high-level expertise within this industry to design a range of thickener systems which complements the current range of wet processing equipment.

Reduce. Reuse. Recycle. Over the past 20 years Blount Bros Construction has removed millions of tons of sediment from the bottom of the Red River to prevent build up that can cause flooding and protects river frontage from erosion. Recycling this material creates a valuable resource for the construction, manufacturing and production industries.

To learn more about their process check out this video.

Natural gas production is set for a significant increase over the next year thanks to the current imbalance between demand and supply, which has pushed prices to record highs, Reuters’ John Kemp reports, citing energy traders..
Source.