Recently in Gas Category

Not everyone standing on the sidelines is cheering Australia's play to challenge Qatar as the world's largest LNG producer by the middle of this decade.

LNG is a boom industry in Australia, with eight new projects currently under construction, worth a total of more than $175 billion. The new projects will add capacity of nearly 70 million mt/year to Australia's existing LNG industry, which comprises the Woodside Petroleum-led 16.3 million mt/year North West Shelf joint venture and the 3.6 million mt/year Darwin LNG
plant, operated by ConocoPhillips.

It's the Lunar New Year in China, which marks the start of the zodiac Year of the Dragon. And 2012 will be another year that the world will again focus on China and actions to be taken by world's second largest oil consumer.

So given the importance of the number eight in Chinese culture, here are eight areas of focus for China's energy demand for 2012.

On January 19, the NYMEX crude-to-gas futures contract ratio hit an all-time, 22-year high of 43-to-1, tightening to 36-to-1 January 25.

Here's the question: Who cares anymore?

For the first time in a decade or so, Europe can -- theoretically at least -- look forward to a relatively uninterrupted period of low-cost wholesale gas supplies. It should not be like this. Given the depressed markets, overseas sellers would be more naturally inclined to postpone their marketing plans or to cancel them outright.

With more production and transport capacity coming on stream and Europe's economies in deep recession, oversupply appears to be the way the market is heading.

The Marcellus Shale has spurred jobs, environmental debates, the possibility of new economic opportunities in revived manufacturing...and now its own radio show.

We've written previously about the US natural gas liquids market facing the problem/blessing of a growing supply of liquids coming from the shale plays. It's a blessing for NGL consumers, and in some ways, it's a blessing, at least now, for drillers: the price of liquids moves mostly in tandem with crude and as a result has made some drilling projects economical when the price of natural gas would otherwise sink those projects economically.

But it's also a problem for petroleum refiners, where they face a declining value of those liquids coming from the refining process.

Those issues are at the center of a new report produced by Bentek Energy, a division of Platts, and Turner, Mason & Co., a refinery consultant. (Full disclosure: Platts uses Turner, Mason refining models to produce Platts Daily Yield.)

Japan and South Korea initiated talks at the end of November on LNG policy that could challenge the domination of the LNG supply chain by the international oil majors and producing countries.

Indeed, the talks could be seen as setting out an outline for an eventual forum of major LNG consuming countries that would provide a counterweight to moves by gas exporting powers to exercise more control over international gas supply.

European nations scrambling to secure their gas supplies have made some big advances in recent weeks. The UK's largest household gas supplier, Centrica, signed on November 21 a $20 billion, 10-year gas supply deal for imports from Norway's Statoil.

Meanwhile, political leaders from Russia, Germany, France and the Netherlands gathered in the German coastal city of Lubmin November 8 to celebrate the inauguration of the first line of the Nord Stream project.

Saudi Arabia is synonymous with oil. But as Platts' Dubai editor Tamsin Carlise writes in this week's "At the Wellhead" column in Platts Oilgram News, the company's signature achievement this year will be its contribution to the natural gas boom that is going on worldwide.