-Irving Oil began an annual fall turnaround at its Saint John, New Brunswick, refinery. The $20 million project will last eight weeks and employ 650 tradespeople on top of the refinery’s existing workforce. Site manager Mark Sherman said the turnaround would bring the company’s total capital investments in the refinery this year to over $200 million.
-North Dakota’s oil production jumped 5% in July even as producers worked to comply with new state flaring-reduction targets. Via Reuters, the new rules place a cap on the percentage of produced natural gas that can be flared each month. The industry has thus far been on target, albeit with lower-than-expected production.
-Meanwhile, the Power River Basin — most of which is located in Wyoming and Montana — is experiencing a boom in oil production. According to the Energy Information Administration, production rebounded from a low of 38,000 barrels per day in 2009 to 78,000 barrels per day during the first quarter of 2014. Horizontal drilling and hydraulic fracturing have made larger portions of the basin’s most productive formations more profitable and unleashed more oil from less productive areas.
-BP signed a 17-year agreement to sell 1.2 million tonnes of LNG per year to Tokyo Electric Power Co. BP will source the LNG from its projects in Australia, the United Arab Emirates, Indonesia, Egypt, Trinidad and Angola. BP also has a liquefaction tolling agreement at the proposed Freeport LNG project, which is expected to make a final investment decision before year’s end.
-Occidental Chemical agreed to pay $190 million associated with the cleanup of the Passaic River in northern New Jersey. Via Bloomberg, the state’s attorney general said Diamond Shamrock Chemical Co. intentionally dumped industrial waste from its Newark site into the river for decades. Occidental Chemical is the legal successor to Diamond Shamrock Chemical.
