LONDON, Dec 14 (Reuters) – Her Majesty Queen Elizabeth II
could be in line for a windfall now that her government is
prepared to start granting licences to frack for shale gas
again.

In her capacity as the Duke of Lancaster, the Queen owns
more than 50,000 acres and subsurface rights to tens of
thousands more across northern England, the part of the country
that has drawn the most interest from companies hunting for
shale gas. Fracking firms will have to pay to put wells on her
property or to drill through the subsurface mineral layers that
she owns.

LONDON, Dec 12 (Reuters) – Not since the early 1980s has
Saudi Arabia seemed so powerful. But the kingdom’s dominance of
the oil market could prove fleeting, as policymakers grapple
with multiple challenges that could slash export earnings by
2020.

For now, Saudi Arabia is the unrivalled master of the oil
market. The kingdom holds virtually all the world’s spare
production capacity. Iran, its main rival within OPEC, has been
sidelined by sanctions. Saudi output is at an all time high,
while Iran’s exports have halved.

LONDON, Dec 11 (Reuters) – Shale oil and gas production will
become a lot cheaper as the industry absorbs and shares lessons
of advanced fracturing techniques, accelerating along a learning
curve that started in the 1940s.

The concept of a learning curve is most often used with
clean energy technologies such as wind power and solar.

LONDON, Dec 10 (Reuters) – North American oil and gas
production is on the verge of another revolution as older
drilling rigs are replaced by equipment that can drill the same
well in half the time and bore much longer horizontal sections
underground.

The number of land-based rigs drilling for oil and gas in
the United States has fallen 12 percent since November 2011,
according to oilfield services company Baker Hughes
International.

LONDON, Dec 7 (Reuters) – The Obama administration will find
it almost impossible to refuse permission for more liquefied
natural gas (LNG) exports now that a report from outside
consultants has concluded unequivocally that exports would be a
net benefit to the U.S. economy.

Current law requires the Department of Energy to approve
export applications unless it can show they are not in the
public interest, which will be hard to do given that a detailed
economic study has now concluded the extra revenues from export
sales will more than offset the impact of higher domestic gas
prices on consumers and energy-consuming businesses.

LONDON, Dec 6 (Reuters) – The more liquefied natural gas
exports that the United States permits, the bigger the net
benefit to its economy, according to a detailed report
commissioned by the U.S. Department of Energy.

But if the report is unequivocal about the economic
benefits, the politics are more complicated.

LONDON, Dec 5 (Reuters) – Hydraulic fracturing to produce
oil and gas has become closely associated in the public mind
with the risk of triggering man-made earthquakes. But the risk
is not high and it is not confined to fracking.

There may be greater danger from geothermal energy
production and pumping carbon dioxide underground as part of
carbon capture and storage projects.

LONDON, Nov 28 (Reuters) – Oklahoma could be on course to
see the next big increase in oil and condensates production,
following North Dakota and Texas, as innovative drilling
companies move in to explore the liquids-rich sections of the
Woodford shale under the western half of the state.

Oklahoma is a very old oil producer: the first oil was
discovered in 1897, a decade before Oklahoma was admitted to the
union.

LONDON, Nov 27 (Reuters) – For the past year, 1,000 metric
tonnes a day of carbon dioxide from the Archer Daniels Midland
ethanol plant at Decatur have been pumped into a sandstone
reservoir 7,000 feet beneath the corn fields of Macon County,
Illinois.

By its first anniversary last week, the project had injected
317,000 metric tonnes of carbon dioxide (CO2), almost a third of
the planned total of 1 million tonnes.

LONDON, Nov 26 (Reuters) – Plentiful and cheap supplies of
natural gas, coupled with near-record prices for diesel and
gasoline, provide a seemingly ideal environment for projects
that convert natural gas into liquid transportation fuels. Yet
most gas producers have hesitated to commit to new projects.

Gas-to-liquids (GTL) beats other options like pipelines,
liquefied natural gas (LNG) and compressed natural gas (CNG) for
smaller gas deposits stranded thousands of kilometres from
consuming markets.