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More extreme weather, heat waves, and inland flooding are some of the impacts that the state of Pennsylvania expects to see with a changing climate. And scientists and economists agree that, if we don’t quickly reduce the greenhouse gas pollution from fossil fuels like coal and gas that contribute to warming the planet, these impacts will only grow more costly and dangerous.
Yet parts of western Pennsylvania, like many regions of the United States, rely on coal and gas production to support the local economy. Through its Here and Real project, the MIT Environmental Solutions Initiative (ESI) is investigating solutions that reduce carbon pollution and are economically just for communities that are reliant on fossil fuel production.
Haaland Confirmed as First Indigenous Secretary of the Interior
WASHINGTON, DC, March 15, 2021 (ENS) – History was made today as the U.S. Senate voted 51-40 to confirm President Joe Biden’s nominee Congresswoman Debra Haaland as Secretary of the Interior. After she is sworn in, Haaland will be the first Native American to serve as a Cabinet secretary. In 2018, she became one of the first two Native women elected to Congress.
Serving as the U.S. Representative for New Mexico’s 1st congressional district since 2019, Haaland is a member of the Laguna Pueblo, a federally recognized tribe of Native American Pueblo people in west-central New Mexico, near the city of Albuquerque.
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Argentina’s Shale Patch Is Poised For A Comeback By Matthew Smith - Mar 11, 2021, 6:00 PM CST
After a harsh 2020 and slow post-pandemic recovery Argentina’s hydrocarbon sector has come roaring back to life. A combination of substantially higher oil prices, government subsidies, favorable legislation and growing demand for light sweet crude oil and natural gas has caused activity in Argentina’s Vaca Muerta (Spanish for dead cow) soar. After fracking activity slowed to almost zero during May 2020, at the height of the COVID-19 pandemic, it then soared to a 17-month high in January 2021. Data obtained by S&P Global Platts shows there were 662 frac stages in the Vaca Muerta by January 2021 or roughly double the 340 stages reported for the same month a year earlier. As a result, crude oil production in the Vaca Muerta is growing at an impressive clip. According to industry consultancy Rystad Energy oil production from the shale oil and natural gas play
Technology and portfolio high grading enables U.S. shale to defy early predictions
This happy circumstance is largely due to a couple of things primarily. The first is technology making the extraction of more oil per unit of interval than even just a few years ago. And, operator high grading of their portfolios to focus almost solely on Tier I acreage. Tier I acreage, as we have discussed in the past is the low cost, high return play that works particularly well in the Permian with its stacked reservoirs.
Shale drillers have simply been making some prodigious wells in the last couple of years, and this increase in the Productivity Index-PI has made itself known. As an example I would cite Devon Energy s, (NYSE:DVN) recent performance in its core Delaware basin area.
Forbes used the Enverus Daily Rig Count as one example: On Sept. 1, 2020, that metric showed the number of active drilling rigs in the United States was near its all-time low of roughly two hundred eighty but today, that figure has surged to four hundred sixty active and working rigs. That represents a whopping 67 percent increase in only half a year.
Moreover, the Primary Vision count of active U.S. frac spreads had recovered to one hundred seventy-five as of Feb. 12, more than doubling the eighty-five seen on August 28 last year. However, that plummeted to forty-one active spreads during the mid-February arctic freeze of Texas, Oklahoma, and other shale states. By Feb. 26, it bounced back up to 140.