Shale Gas

A leading advocate against Marcellus Shale natural gas drilling in the Delaware River basin has resigned from a coalition of civic organizations because she says the group will not take a harder stand against shale-gas development. Maya K. van Rossum, who heads the Delaware Riverkeeper Network, said Friday she had stepped down from the Citizens Marcellus Shale Commission to protest the group's final report, which will be issued Monday. Van Rossum said the commission declined to support a moratorium on natural gas development, as the Riverkeeper has advocated.

A giant Indian industrial concern has bought a second stake of natural-gas acreage in Pennsylvania, underscoring the international scope of the Marcellus Shale boom. Reliance Industries Ltd., which bills itself as India's largest private-sector company, said Thursday that it would pay $392 million to acquire a 60 percent stake in 104,400 Marcellus acres in central and northeastern Pennsylvania. The acreage is now controlled by a 50-50 venture of Carrizo Oil & Gas Inc., a Houston, Texas, exploration company, and Avista Capital Partners, a private equity firm.

Chevron Corp., which entered the Pennsylvania shale-gas competition this year with the acquisition of Atlas Energy Inc., on Wednesday substantially beefed up its stake by acquiring new acreage in southwestern Pennsylvania. The San Ramon, Calif., company will acquire leases covering 228,000 acres from closely held Chief Oil & Gas L.L.C. and Tug Hill Inc. The terms weren't disclosed. In February, Chevron paid $3.58 billion for Atlas and its 622,000 Marcellus acres. Atlas was founded by Philadelphia's Cohen family.

Since the federal government deregulated natural gas prices in the 1980s, the prices of crude oil and natural gas have moved more or less in tandem. But in the last three years, the prices have become unhinged. One reason is the dramatic increase in natural gas production from unconventional formations such as Pennsylvania's Marcellus Shale, which has driven down natural gas prices while crude oil prices have soared. When the two fossil fuels are compared on the basis of energy equivalency, natural gas is a bargain compared with oil. A dollar spent on natural gas buys more than three times the energy that a dollar spent on crude oil buys.

A new national study says Pennsylvania, where Marcellus Shale drilling is expanding dramatically, is expected to lead in job growth attributed to unconventional natural gas development. An industry-sponsored study by IHS Global Insight found that unconventional gas production, including shale gas development, supported more than one million jobs nationwide in 2010 and was projected to grow to nearly 1.5 million jobs by 2015. Unconventional gas production supported nearly 57,000 jobs in Pennsylvania in 2010, 13,600 of those directly, according to the study, which projected that the industry would support 111,000 jobs in the Keystone State by 2015, including 26,000 directly.

When the folks at Talisman Energy dreamed up a children's coloring book about a dinosaur explaining the origins of natural gas, they had no idea that the "friendly fracosaurus" would become a casualty in the anti-fracking cultural wars. "Talisman Terry's Energy Adventure," a 24-page tale about a dinosaur wearing a hard hat and work boots, achieved a pinnacle of corporate communications when it got national television exposure from comedian Stephen Colbert, who lampooned it Monday on the Comedy Channel's Colbert Report . Colbert, in a five-minute segment ridiculing hydraulic fracturing, the controversial process for extracting gas from rock formations such as Pennsylvania's Marcellus Shale, singled out the coloring book as a way for Talisman "to counter their image problem.

Natural gas drillers are accelerating exploration of several Appalachian rock formations that sandwich the Marcellus Shale beneath Pennsylvania, and some experts say the new discoveries may be as prolific as the Marcellus itself. "What we've got is Marcellus times two," said Terry Engelder, the Pennsylvania State University geosciences professor whose Marcellus Shale estimates in 2008 first drew public attention to the region's shale gas potential. Since The Inquirer reported in May that drillers had found recoverable gas in the Utica and Upper Devonian Shales, several operators have become more openly optimistic about a potential natural gas triple play in the region.

The Marcellus Shale, which according to some geologists is the world's second-largest natural-gas field, holds the potential to create hundreds of thousands of new jobs for Pennsylvanians - while reducing our dangerous dependence on foreign energy resources. We've known about the Marcellus Shale for years. But advances - specifically, horizontal drilling techniques coupled with a 60-year-old technology called hydraulic fracturing, in which fluid is forced underground - have finally enabled us to reach its enormous stores of clean-burning fuel.

Even though a congressman boasts that his bill signed into law in January will assure steps are taken to safeguard new shale-gas pipelines snaking across Pennsylvania, safety regulators surveyed nationally say they still need convincing. The state regulators' fears, expressed to federal auditors about the public-safety threat from badly built or shoddily maintained pipelines, stand as a continuing concern for residents living amid Pennsylvania's gas boom. At issue is whether thousands of miles of pipeline stretched across rural areas will be subject to safety checks to safeguard against flaws or lax upkeep, given that federal law now exempts these lines from safety rules.

Royal Dutch Shell P.L.C. became the latest big international player to buy a stake in the Marcellus Shale when it announced Friday that it will pay $4.7 billion for East Resources Inc., a Pennsylvania company that has morphed into a hefty natural-gas operator. In buying East Resources, headquartered in Warrendale, Pa., Shell will acquire about 1.05 million acres of gas leases, including 650,000 acres of Marcellus Shale rights in Pennsylvania, West Virginia and New York. East Resources, which is based in Allegheny County, is most active in Tioga County, in north-central Pennsylvania, and also owns substantial acreage in Allegheny National Forest.