Petrohawk 3 New Haynesville Shale Wells 73 Mmcfe/d
HOUSTON, Dec. 9 /PRNewswire-FirstCall/
Petrohawk Announces Three New Haynesville Shale Wells Placed
on Production at a Combined Rate of 73 Mmcfe/d.
The Company expects to complete five additional
Haynesville Shale wells by the end of the year.
-- Petrohawk Energy Corporation ("Petrohawk" or the "Company") (NYSE:
HK) has placed three additional Haynesville Shale wells on production
at a combined rate of 73 Mmcfe/d, one with the highest reported initial
production rate of any well in Petrohawk's history, as follows:
The Brown 17 #4 (69% W.I.),
located in Section 17-T16N-R11W, Bossier
Parish, Louisiana, was
completed on November 18 and produced at a rate
of 23.4 Mmcfe/d on a 26/64"
choke with 7,700# flowing casing pressure.
The Goodwin 9 #5 (97% W.I.),
located in Section 9-T16N-R11W, Bossier
Parish, Louisiana, was
completed on November 25 and produced at a rate
of 21.1 Mmcfe/d on a 26/64"
choke with 6,750# flowing casing pressure.
The Sample 9 #1 (100% W.I.)
is located in Section 9-T14N-R11W, Red
River Parish, Louisiana,
approximately 12 miles south of Elm Grove
Field. It was completed on
November 27 and produced at a rate of 28.2
Mmcfe/d on a 30/64" choke
with 7,100# flowing casing pressure.
Petrohawk Energy Corporation is an independent energy company engaged
in the acquisition, production, exploration and development of natural
gas and oil with properties concentrated in Northwest Louisiana and
East Texas (Haynesville / Bossier Shale and Cotton Valley), Arkansas
(Fayetteville Shale), South Texas (Eagle Ford Shale), Oklahoma and the
Permian basin.
For more information contact Joan Dunlap, Vice President - Investor
Relations, at 832-204-2737 or jdunlap@petrohawk.com. For additional
information about Petrohawk, please visit our website at
http://www.petrohawk.com.
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EU,
Egypt sign energy cooperation agreement
Doris Leblond OGJ Correspondent PARIS, Dec. 6
The European Commission and Egypt's foreign affairs minister, Ahmed
Aboul Gheit, signed a memorandum of understanding Dec. 2 to enhance
energy cooperation between Egypt and the European Union. The pact would
reinforce energy security for both.
Among five priorities are the establishment of a work program to
gradually converge Egypt's energy markets with the EU's and the
development of energy networks such as the Arab Gas Pipeline, which
could transport Egyptian and possibly Iraqi natural gas resources to
European countries.
Other areas covered include market reforms, promotion of renewable
energy and energy efficiency, and technological and industry
cooperation.
"Egypt is the EU's sixth largest natural gas supplier and a key transit
country between the Middle East, Africa, and the EU," said EC
Commissioner Benita Ferrero-Waldner. "Egypt's commitment to energy
reforms is crucial for the creation of a Euro-Mediterranean energy
market."
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Natural Gas Demand
Slump Adds Pressure To Prices
12/5/2008 NEW YORK Dow Jones
Big industrial companies are sharply cutting back their natural gas
consumption as the economic slowdown erodes demand for their products,
adding downward pressure to already sinking gas prices.
The front-month futures price for gas is now down about 58% from its
early July peak, as a surge in domestic U.S. supplies raised fears of a
glut just as demand was starting to crumble. Between April and
September, monthly gas consumption by industrial users dropped 14% to
4.756 billion cubic feet, the lowest monthly figure since at least
2001, according to U.S. Department of Energy statistics. And anecdotal
evidence indicates consumption is falling even further as gas-intensive
industries ease back production.
According to an informal survey by the Industrial Energy Consumers of
America of eight major industrial companies, gas usage is down 22%, on
average, from a year ago. The Washington, D.C.-based lobbying group
said its survey comprised a cross-section of major industrial
companies, including fertilizer, brick, glass, and automotive
businesses. Industrial companies account for about 30% of total U.S.
gas demand, according to the Energy Information Administration, the
statistical arm of the Department of Energy.
"We think consumption will continue to fall into 2009," said Paul
Cicio, the president of the IECA. "Capital expenditures are being put
on hold."
Cutting Back
Natural gas is the base ingredient for products including plastic,
fertilizer, antifreeze and some fabrics. Companies also use natural gas
for onsite power plants and heating systems. The falloff in
natural gas demand has been particularly noticeable in the fertilizer
industry because gas is an essential raw material for nitrogen-based
fertilizer production. Agrium Inc. (AGU), a Canadian fertilizer
company with extensive U.S. operations, has cut its natural gas
consumption by between 5% and 10% this year, compared to last year,
said Richard Downey, the company's vice president of investor
relations. Agrium shut down one unit of a large fertilizer plant in
Alberta indefinitely in September amid falling fertilizer demand and
high natural gas prices.
But the company's gas demand could rebound in the spring as planting
season begins, Downey said. "We've seen a slight decline in our
gas purchase requirements, but we do think it's a short-term
phenomenon," he said.
CF Industries Holdings, Inc. (CF), a Deerfield, Ill.-based fertilizer
company, hasn't reported a decline in natural gas demand or fertilizer
production, but the company is "monitoring the situation closely," said
spokesman Charles Nekvasil.
Expectations of lower industrial demand have led analysts to slash
their natural gas-price forecasts for next year. U.K.-based energy
advisory firm Wood Mackenzie said last month that it expects U.S.
natural gas prices to trade in a range of $5.00 to $6.00 a million
British thermal units for the next five years. Gas for January delivery
was recently trading down 4.4% at $5.752 a million British thermal
units on the New York Mercantile exchange.
"In coming to our conclusions, we have taken account of...the decline
in demand due to a prolonged recession to (the fourth quarter) 2010,"
said Jen Snyder, head of Wood Mackenzie North American Gas Research,
speaking at the company's Houston Energy forum in November.
Meanwhile, Morgan Stanley has cut its 2009 natural gas price
expectation Tuesday to $7/MMBtu from $8/MMBtu. "Industrial demand
trends continue to weaken, as chemical demand looks to be a key area of
potential weakness in '09," Morgan Stanley analysts wrote in a note to
clients.
The Federal Reserve's Industrial Production Index, which includes
gas-intensive industries such as petrochemicals and refining, fell 6%
in September, compared with the previous year.
Dow Chemical Co. (DOW) Chief Executive Andrew Liveris on Thursday told
CNBC that he expects the company to announce cost reductions in coming
weeks to deal with "miserable" economic conditions.
Spokesmen from chemical giants DuPont Co. (DD) and Dow didn't return
calls for comment.
Looking Beyond Winter
In the near term, sliding industrial gas demand could be offset by
unusually cold winter weather in the major gas-consuming regions, which
could spark significant heating demand. WSI Corp., an Andover,
Mass.-based private forecaster, is predicting below-normal temperatures
in the Northeast, Southeast and Midwest in December.
Beyond the winter heating season, falling industrial consumption,
combined with continued production growth from natural gas-shale
reservoirs and rising imports of liquefied natural gas, is likely to
pressure prices lower, analysts said. Falling petroleum prices are also
likely to drive the natural gas market lower, said Amy Sweeney, a
statistician at the Energy Information Administration in Washington,
D.C. "A lot of industrial consumers can switch between natural
gas and petroleum products to fire their plants, and petroleum prices
have dropped a lot," she said.
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Schools, students
plugging into hybrid repairs
Dec. 08, 2008 Las Vegas Review-Journal
When the world changes, those who teach about the world must change,
too.
And there's a lot to learn. Working on a hybrid can,
quite
literally, kill you. Pate lifted the battery cover on one of the
hybrids, where 300 amps of electricity course through fat orange
wires. "That could reduce you to a pile of dust in a
millisecond," he
said.
That's why Paul Pate, the director of transportation programs at the
College of Southern Nevada, needed to learn all he could about electric
motors. He is in charge, after all, of teaching future mechanics how to
fix cars. If he didn't know how to fix an electric car, how was he
supposed to teach others? Electric cars are here now, in the form
of hybrids, and they need to be maintained. Which is why CSN's
auto technology program has four of them. The newest is a
Chevrolet Malibu hybrid that arrived a few weeks ago.
"We're trying to get enough vehicles so our students will be exposed to
all the types," Pate said.
The program has a Toyota Prius, a Honda Civic and a Ford Escape, too,
all hybrids. The cars have electric motors and gasoline engines.
So, in addition to learning about fixing regular cars, trucks and
buses, students have to learn to fix those as well. Student
Agustin Mota, 22, one day wants to run his own shop. So he has to learn
about everything. "You have to always keep ahead of the game,"
Mota said. "Every five or six years, you've got a new technology coming
out. It's constantly changing."
In the garage area last week sat a Ford Mustang with most of its engine
missing, a couple of big semi tractors, a front loader and a humongous
RV, all in different states of repair.
Diesel engines, including one that runs on compressed natural gas, sat
on racks. A camshaft and a crankshaft shared a bench.
Pate said the auto technology program doesn't have a separate course of
study for students to learn just about hybrids. "We try to roll the
alternative fuels component into everything we teach. We want them to
be prepared for every type of vehicle they'll see."
Robert Mundt, 20, said it's all part of becoming a better mechanic.
He's currently working at Desert BMW. "It's a lot different," he
said of learning about hybrids. "There's a lot more safety
precautions." There's the electricity. There's also a complicated
computing system, which requires its own cooling system.
Most hybrids use a different oil than regular cars, different tires and
a different braking system.
Even body work is different. You can't subject a hybrid's battery to
the high temperatures required for some paint jobs.
You'd want your mechanic to know all of this, especially now, when
hybrids are getting popular.
"There will be, in the next three to five years, 25 models or more,"
Pate said. "This is the kind of car our students will see."
Eventually, there will be fully electric vehicles. There will be
hydrogen powered cars. And who knows what else.
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Alaska's TransCanada gas
pipeline: complete by 2022
by Lori Tipton Friday, December 5, 2008 FAIRBANKS, Alaska
Gov. Sarah Palin, along with two of her commissioners, met Friday in
Fairbanks to sign TransCanada's license to construct a natural gas
pipeline. The signing happened Friday morning at the Morris Thompson
Visitor's Center.
Friday also marked the two-year anniversary since Palin and her
administration met in Fairbanks to kick off meetings with all of the
parties interested in commercializing North Slope gas.
"This is a historic day for Alaska and for the North American continent
when you consider the impacts this project will have on this part of
our world," Palin said.
Natural Resources Commissioner Tom Irwin and Revenue Commissioner Pat
Galvin signed TransCanada's license, which was approved under the
Alaska Gasline Inducement Act.
TransCanada is the company that was chosen by the administration and
approved by the Legislature to build a natural gas pipeline from
Prudhoe Bay to Alberta, Canada. "This is a significant step as we
march forward toward Alaska's next economic lifeline," Palin said.
"It's our next economic engine." TransCanada CEO Hal Kvisle says
the company has been interested in this project for 30 years. "In
our planning we've decided the size of the pipeline, the route of the
pipelne, and we concluded those things that will work best," Kvisle
said.
The license confirms the state's commitment to this project,
Kvisle said, though he said there is still a long road ahead and a lot
of work is left to be done. "On behalf of TransCanada, I look
forward to working closely with the state of Alaska, the
administration, its people, the Natives of Alaska, and potential
customers for shipping on this pipeline," Kvisle said. "We think it
will be a dream of a project."
There's about 10 more years of hard work ahead in order to get the
pipeline online, TransCanada says. That includes the regulatory
process, completing commercial negotiations with the suppliers, and
getting all the necessary approvals from state and federal
authorities. After all of that is complete, it will take another
three years just to build the pipeline.
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TransCanada and Denali
pipeline group plans
By Tim Bradner Alaska Journal of Commerce 12/8/08
TransCanada Corp. will receive its Alaska Gasline Inducement Act
license to build a $30 billion-plus natural gas pipeline, which
entitles the Calgary-based pipeline company to receive $500 million in
state grants. Award of the license had been expected by
TransCanada and what it really means is that half of the Canadian
pipeline company's costs in preparing for a 2010 open season will be
reimbursed by the state. An open season is when a pipeline company
solicits customers to ship gas. Under the state's AGIA law, the
state will reimburse up to $500 million of costs for a pipeline company
that agrees to a set of conditions specified in the AGIA license.
TransCanada hasn't waited for the AGIA license to be official before
starting its work, company vice president Tony Palmer told Alaska
business leaders recently. Because of the tight schedule in
preparing for the open season, Palmer said TransCanada did aerial
photography this fall along two possible pipeline routes in Alaska, one
route from the North Slope to the Canada border and the other an
alternative route to Valdez, where a liquefied natural gas project has
been discussed. TransCanada has also started preliminary
environmental and engineering work, and costs incurred before the award
of the AGIA license are carried totally by TransCanada, Palmer
said. Palmer gave a briefing on the project at the Resource
Development Council's annual conference in Anchorage Nov. 19.
Meanwhile, TransCanada's rival, the Denali pipeline group being by BP
and ConocoPhillips, isn't sitting still. Denali now has winter field
work underway, a program of geotechnical studies and borehole drilling,
as well as preliminary engineering studies, and is planning a robust
2009 field season both in Alaska and Canada, Denali president Bud
Fackrell told the RDC conference. Denali also plans its open season in
2010 to solicit customers.
Palmer said TransCanada's project hasn't been affected so far by
current difficulties in financial markets.
“It has had no affect on our plans, but it must be realized that we are
in unique circumstances,” in the international financial situation, he
said. TransCanda itself is financially strong, and raised $1 billion in
new equity financing in a recent offering. “This shows that capital
markets remain open to us.” Alaskans should consider the pipeline
project in the long term and not have opinions swayed “when energy
prices are high or when they are low, such as in the last two months,”
Palmer said.
In Alaska, TransCanada plans a 2009 field season and will let
environmental contracts in 2009 and bring a major engineering
contractor on board in 2010, Palmer said. In 2011 the company will
begin an environmental impact statement process with a separate
contractor selected for the EIS. Under terms of its AGIA license,
TransCanada is committed to continue work on the project even if the
2010 initial open season fails to attract enough gas shipping
contracts. The company would hold additional open seasons as work
continues toward approvals by the U.S. Federal Energy Regulatory
Commission and Canada's National Energy Board. After the 2010 the
state will pick up 80 percent of the costs, although the maximum the
state can reimburse TransCanada is $500 million. TransCanada
expects to spend $80 million in preparations for the 2010 open season
and $600 million to the final certification by the FERC and NEB, Palmer
said.
In contrast, the Denali project will spend $600 million in preparations
for the open season, Fackrell told the RDC. "It's important for
us to have the highest-quality cost estimate we can do,” Fackrell said.
The cost for Denali through to the FERC and NEB certifications is
expected to be several billion dollars.
TransCanada will be able to do the engineering and cost estimates for
the gas pipeline for less than what the Denali group will pay because
the company has a substantial amount of information from previous work
it has done on an Alaska pipeline, and the experience the company has
in building pipelines in Canada, Palmer has said previously.
The Alaska project planned by TransCanada, a 1,715-mile pipeline from
the North Slope to Alberta, is “huge, but not unprecedented for
TransCanada,” Palmer told the RDC Nov. 19. If completed, the project
would represent about 5 percent of the company's existing
pipelines. TransCanada has also previously completed larger, more
difficult projects, he said. The company's legacy pipeline system built
across Canada 50 years ago was actually larger and technically more
challenging than the Alaska pipeline, Palmer told the RDC.
The company also has its Keystone project, a large new oil pipeline,
now under construction in the Lower 48. This will involve a total of
4,000 miles of new pipe when completed in 2010. TransCanada's share of
this project has increased from 50 percent to 80 percent following
ConocoPhillips' reduction of its ownership from 50 percent to 20
percent, Palmer said.
Fackrell said the Denali group is busy with its winter and upcoming
summer field programs. Denali will also be engaged in preliminary
engineering on the gas treatment plant at Prudhoe Bay and the
pipeline. The group will work this year with the state Department
of Transportation and Public Facilities on substantial upgrades needed
for Alaska highways and bridges to enable them to carry heavy loads for
pipeline construction, Fackrell told the RDC. Fackrell said
Denali has done a pre-filing of its application with the FERC, a
procedural step that allows FERC engineers to work closely with Denali
in preparations of the application. Palmer said TransCanada has chosen
not to make a FERC pre-filing, but will do one after the 2010 open
season.
Palmer said TransCanada has estimated the cost of building the pipeline
at $26 billion in 2007 dollars, and that these estimates will be
updated for the 2010 open season. The current estimate is for a toll,
or transportation charge, of $3 per thousand cubic feet or under for
moving gas from Alaska to Alberta.
TransCanada must work to keep the construction costs under control to
prevent the toll charge from rising, as there are competitors in the
market. For example, predictions are that gas produced from new oil
shale wells could reach 5 billion cubic feet a day by 2010. “This is as
much as the Alaska pipeline will deliver after 2018,” Palmer said.
Also, there are several import terminals for liquefied natural gas
under construction that will soon be capable of bringing substantial
quantities of imported gas into North American markets.
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