Natural Gas News – June 21, 2018

Natural Gas News – June 21, 2018

US, Canada Require Nearly $800 Billion Investment to Support Oil, Natural Gas Industries

Daily Energy Insider: From now until 2035, a yearly investment of $44 billion — a total of around $791 billion — will be required on average to keep natural gas, oil and natural gas liquid (NGL) infrastructure going in the United States and Canada, according to a new report released by the Interstate Natural Gas Association of America Foundation. The study — North American Midstream Infrastructure through 2035: Significant Development Continues — is an update to a 2016 infrastructure report, now meant to cover the 18-year period from 2018 to 2035. Natural gas will dominate the needs of this period, the report says, as its energy infrastructure needs around $417 billion for pipelines, compressors, laterals, gas-lease equipment, processing, gas storage and LNG export facilities. It’s a rapidly growing market and one which needs significant capital to continue growing.

Stepping on the Gas – China’s Home-Built Fracking Boom

Investing reported: On a flattened mountaintop a two-and-half-hour drive south of Chongqing in southwest China, a fleet of towering, red fracking trucks pumps chemicals and sand into a 1,500-metre horizontal well deep under the ground. The equipment was designed and built by China’s state-owned energy major Sinopec, the result of a decades-long government drive to develop low-cost domestic technology to tap the country’s vast shale gas resources buried in the region’s mountainous terrain. It is the latest key technology that China has learned to master. Except for a handful of higher-end tools, Sinopec and a crop of independent companies make everything from trucks and pumps to drilling fluid and proppants – treated sand or man-made ceramics used to “prop” open a fracture to allow gas to escape.