LNG

Argentina’s President-elect Javier Milei has offered the post of President and Chief Executive of state-owned energy company Yacimientos Petroliferos Fiscales (YPF) to Horacio Marín, an industry veteran and shale drilling expert who is a petroleum engineering graduate of the University of Texas.

Empire Energy Group Ltd, the small Australian exploration and production company, has seen its shares rise by 19 percent since a regulatory breakthrough in the onshore Beetaloo Basin of the Northern Territory and since its discovered natural gas resources were independently revised to an LNG-scale asset.

The US Department of Energy’s Office of Fossil Energy has delivered a new report on likely impacts of the “ill-conceived” ban on hydraulic fracturing proposed by the incoming Administration that would cost millions of jobs and make gasoline and electricity prices much higher for all Americans while risking a recession.

IGas, the leading UK shale-gas exploration company, reported extremely positive prospects for the nation’s shale resources as a preferred alternative at minimum cost compared with growing and expensive LNG shipments from Qatar and elsewhere and Norwegian pipeline gas supplies.

Australian liquefied natural gas producers have welcomed the decisions by the Northern Territory government to lift a ban on hydraulic fracturing for onshore shale gas exploration and said it was an opportunity for the next LNG supply gap in the 2020s.

The state government of the southeast Australian state of Victoria has introduced legislation to permanently ban hydraulic fracturing for unconventional natural gas, coal-seam gas and oil and will put a cap on any compensation paid to energy companies with current licences.