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The Gas Man Cometh: BP Spill turns investors' eyes toward the Marcellus Shale
The Gas Man Cometh: BP Spill turns investors' eyes toward the Marcellus Shale
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The recent explosion of a Marcellus Shale mine – only the latest and worst in a series of spills, leaks, well contaminations, and other environmental damage resulting from the hydraulic fracturing ("fracking") method of gas drilling in Pennsylvania – seems to finally have got some of our representatives questioning the pace at which fracking is allowed to develop in this state.
So far, that pace has been as fast as possible, damn the risks – as evinced by the more than one thousand environmental violations racked up against the industry in just the last two years, including more than a hundred spills, according to Department of Environmental Protection documents reviewed by the City Paper.
But it looks like the pressure to keep that pace fast – or increase it – is mounting in the wake of the BP spill, which has investors looking at the natural gas below Pa. with new attention.
A couple of days ago, the Wall Street Journal reported that Chesapeake Energy – a major player in hydraulic fracturing here – is selling stock in its company like hotcakes:
"Chesapeake Energy Corp. said it has sold $900 million in preferred stock to a group of private investors, including Asian sovereign wealth funds, cashing in on heightened interest in onshore energy following the BP PLC offshore drilling disaster.
Turns out, Chesapeake isn't the only Marcellus Shale company cashing in on increasing thirst for this region's gas. Reports the Motley Fool:
The increasing presence of Asian funds clearly comes as interest in natural gas ratchets higher worldwide. Other deals have involved India's Reliance Industries forking over $1.7 billion in April to Atlas Energy (Nasdaq: ATLS) in exchange for a sizable position in the Marcellus Shale. Also, two months earlier, Japan's Mitsui paid $1.4 billion for about a third of Anadarko's (NYSE: APC) Marcellus holdings.
With this kind of global pressure to keep drilling, it becomes even more important to ask whether our state officials, legislators and the increasingly beleaguered regulators both, will be able to keep this industry in check – or whether it's time for a federal agency like the EPA to take this thing over. (Currently, fracking is exempted from federal oversight by a loophole in the energy bill masterminded by former V.P. Dick Cheney).
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ItÂ’s amazing to me that BP new the risks with off-shore drilling and still spent all that money rather than invest in new newer fuel options. http://bit.ly/aN9Bms
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