Chinese oil company, Chesapeake Energy enter deal for shale project in Texas

The China National Offshore Oil Corp. will pay Chesapeake Energy $2.2 billion for a one-third interest in a South Texas oil and natural gas shale project and will pay billions of dollars more for its share of development costs over the next several years.

Chesapeake Energy, an Oklahoma City-based domestic exploration company, announced the deal Sunday night, saying it will help speed development of resources on 600,000 acres in the Eagle Ford shale play that could help keep natural gas prices low and boost production of unconventional U.S. oil resources.

"They're providing the capital and we're providing the expertise and assets, and the output will be the development of American assets, less U.S. dependence on foreign oil and the creation of 20,000 jobs and tax revenues for all levels of government," Aubrey K. McClendon, Chesapeake's chief executive, said in an interview.

The investment by CNOOC is one of the company's biggest. Other CNOOC investments around the world have been aimed in part at securing sources of oil for China's growing economy, but this investment will not result in any oil shipments to China. Chesapeake will sell the resources, almost certainly in the United States, and send CNOOC its share of the proceeds.

Chesapeake has been seeking to raise money to help develop its extensive inventory of oil and gas acreage. The company has also been trying to pare its debt, which peaked at about 60 percent of the company's book value and which on Sept. 30 stood at about 42 percent. McClendon said the company's target was in the 30s.

CNOOC will pay $1.1 billion now and another $1.1 billion over the next two years by covering 75 percent of Chesapeake's share of development costs. After that, CNOOC will pay a third of the cost of all wells, which run about $6 million each and could number 5,000 or more over the next few years as the region is developed, McClendon said.

Chesapeake said CNOOC's investment will enable Chesapeake to quadruple the number of rigs it has drilling in the region to about 40 by the end of 2012.

Given the cost of development, many independent companies such as Chesapeake have been looking overseas for investors. U.S.-based oil giants such as Exxon Mobil and Conoco Phillips already have stakes in the region. Last week, Statoil and Talisman bought about 100,000 acres from Denver-based Enduring Resources. They paid about the same price as CNOOC did for its interest.

China has some shale gas, but the deal with Chesapeake does not involve any technology transfer or future project in China, McClendon said. He said Chesapeake has its hands full trying to develop resources in the United States.

Unlike shale developments elsewhere in the United States, the Eagle Ford has greater potential to produce crude oil as well as natural gas, McClendon said. He estimated that the United States could ultimately produce half a million barrels a day from shale. The country consumes 19.5 million barrels of oil a day, most of it imported.

The development of oil and gas from shale has aroused controversy over questions of how it would affect water supplies. And so far, most shale developments in the United States recently have produced natural gas, much of it from Pennsylvania and other parts of the northeast.

"Chesapeake's embedded safety culture and integrated environmental protection strategies will be adopted to safeguard personnel and the surface and subsurface environment," Chesapeake said in its news release.

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Lawyers taking center stage in oil-spill investigation

HOUSTON - The Macondo well gushes no more, but the lawyers are just getting started.

They go wall to wall in a Hilton hotel conference room, sitting at long tables that face the outnumbered investigators assigned to find the cause of the April 20 Deepwater Horizon disaster. The thermometer may be hitting 100 outside, but the room is kept perfect for the men and women in power suits, many from Washington, Chicago, New Orleans and Dallas.

The investigation, a joint operation by the Coast Guard and the Bureau of Ocean Energy Management, is supposed to help the government determine what went wrong and recommend reforms. But the hearings have largely been taken over by lawyers for the major players in the disaster - including BP, rig owner Transocean and the contractor for the cement job, Halliburton - who are trying to prepare for what are sure to be many civil trials to come.

They are generally civil to one another, but their clients have conflicting interests, with billions of dollars at stake and a Justice Department probe shadowing everything.

"The 900-pound gorilla in the room is the criminal investigation," said Pat Fanning, the attorney for one of the top Transocean managers on the rig.

Testimony this week has focused on usual suspects: the construction of the well and maintenance of the blowout preventer. But who's to blame, what piece of equipment or procedure proved fatally deficient, or to what degree the calamity could have been foreseen are issues the lawyers will likely tangle over for years to come.

In a new twist, BP has declared that a Halliburton employee, Jesse Gagliano, who warned that the cement job on the Macondo well might not function properly, should have stopped the operation outright if he had real doubts about safety.

Gagliano testified Tuesday that he told BP engineers on April 15 that if BP proceeded with the cement job as designed, it would have a gas-flow problem. Three days later, he wrote that, with only seven centralizers to center the casing, "this well is considered to have a SEVERE gas flow problem."

Gagliano said he and the BP engineers worked together, late into the night of April 15, trying to resolve the problem. He recommended that BP use 21 centralizers to keep the casing properly positioned. But even though an additional 15 were flown to the rig, BP chose not to use them. The cementing job proceeded with six.

Under cross-examination by BP lawyer Rick Godfrey, Gagliano acknowledged that in some documents, as well as during several conference calls with BP and Transocean managers, he did not cite the gas-flow potential or raise other alarms.

"BP had made their decision," Gagliano said. "They had decided not to follow my recommendation."

After he testified, BP released a pointed statement: "If Halliburton had significant concerns about its ability to provide a safe and high-quality cement job in the Macondo well, then it had the responsibility and obligation to refuse to perform the job. To do otherwise would have been morally repugnant."

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Prices of crude oil and gasoline rise as violence in Libya upsets markets

Crude oil prices in New York broke through the $100-a-barrel threshold Thursday as violence in Libya continued to shake world financial markets and threatened to sidetrack the U.S. economic recovery.

But prices fell back later in the day, after a Saudi official said the kingdom would make up for any Libyan production lost as a result of upheaval there and the International Energy Agency said it was ready to release emergency stockpiles. President Obama also said the United States would be able to "ride out" the disruption in oil supplies.

After touching $103.41 a barrel, crude oil for April delivery ended up down slightly for the day, at $97.28 on the New York Mercantile Exchange. In Europe, the price of Brent grade crude oil, another important benchmark, hit $119 a barrel before dropping back to $114.

But the triple-digit petroleum price weighed heavily on stock markets for much of the day and heightened fears that high fuel costs could be a drain on consumers. Thursday's closing price was still about 50 percent higher than the price nine months ago and the higest level since September 2008.

For U.S. consumers, higher oil prices most directly affect drivers and truckers, who devour the vast majority of U.S. petroleum products. U.S. pump prices for regular gasoline jumped 4 cents a gallon overnight, to $3.23, an eight-cent increase in the past week and 55 cents more than a year ago.

"Coming just before springtime, the timing of the latest crude oil price spike is foreboding. If crude prices were to stay around $100 per barrel, we could expect to see the price for a gallon of unleaded regular rise to about $3.40 in the not-too-distant future," said John B. Townsend II, AAA Mid-Atlantic's manager of public and government affairs. "Motorists across the country are already spending in excess of$1.2 billion a day on fuel purchases, and that's likely to increase in coming weeks."

But oil is a component in the price of a vast variety of goods, including air tickets and food. Higher prices hit big users such as Wal-Mart, petrochemical firms and the U.S. military.

At FedEx, which every month adjusts its fuel surcharge on customers, chief executive Fred Smith said that higher fuel prices would have "not an enormous effect" but that "what's of much greater concern is the effect on the economy overall." He said high fuel prices were like a "tax imposed on the American economy" that would hurt people's buying power.

Because most U.S. oil is imported, money from gasoline sales is largely flowing overseas, inflating the U.S. trade deficit.

Adam E. Sieminski, chief energy economist at Deutsche Bank, said every $5 increase in oil prices could shave two-tenths ofa percent off global economic growth. "If growth was supposed to be 4 percent and ends up being 3 percent, that would be a nasty surprise," he said.

The price of crude oil has surged since Libyans began a revolt against leader Moammar Gaddafi last week, although it has been climbing for most of the past year.

Goldman Sachs analysts warned in a report that Libya's unrest created "significant upside risk" and reduced the ability of the Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries to respond to further supply disruptions.

Some analysts argued, however, that the spike in oil prices was an overreaction to the political upheaval in North Africa and the Middle East. Michael Kouri, an analyst with UBS Securities Canada, said it was "a dramatic reaction since current disruption to crude supply at present is minimal."

Libya produces about 1.5 million barrels a day, or nearly2 percent of the world's supplies. Some of that oil is still moving, companies said. Repsol, a Spanish oil company, said production in the Libyan fields in which it is a partner was running at 160,000 barrels a day, down from 360,000. Eni chief executive Paolo Scaroni said in Rome that Eni's net production was 120,000, down from 280,000 barrels. Analysts also said more than 350,000 barrels a day of production comes directly from offshore platforms.

Moreover, world stockpiles of crude oil are substantial. The Goldman report noted that spare production capacity and inventories could cover more than 100 days of consumption even if Libya halted all exports.

But a trader at one major U.S. refiner said traders were worried about unrest spreading to Algeria or some other major oil-exporting country.

"What we don't want is for another oil producer to get involved in this," Sieminski said.

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BP cost-cutting measures are focus of U.S. inquiry into gulf spill

METAIRIE, LA. - There's been a lot of talk about the "safety culture" at BP in the wake of the Deepwater Horizon disaster in the Gulf of Mexico. Now, federal investigators are probing what looks to them like BP's save-money culture.

At a federal hearing this week, an investigator revealed that BP's top manager on a drilling rig is given a performance evaluation that includes the category "Every Dollar Counts and Simplification."

Of 13 employee evaluations reviewed by investigators, 12 had documented ways they had saved the company large sums of money, typically six-figure amounts, and one had put together a spreadsheet showing that he could account for $490,000 in savings, said Jason Mathews, an investigator for the Bureau of Ocean Energy Management, Regulation and Enforcement, which is conducting the joint inquiry with the Coast Guard.

BP witnesses have acknowledged this week and in previous hearings that oil drilling is a business, and costs have to be taken into account. But they've said safety always comes first, and they denied compromising safety to save money.

But the government this week raised the question of whether BP took incremental shortcuts because it felt rushed to finish the problem-plagued Macondo exploration well, a job costing BP about a million dollars a day. Simply leasing the Deepwater Horizon rig from Transocean was costing $525,000 a day. Eleven people died when the mile-deep well blew out April 20, and more than 4 million barrels of oil spewed into the Gulf of Mexico in the nation's worst offshore oil spill.

The hearing at a Holiday Inn conference room was packed with lawyers for oil companies and rig workers. Although not a trial, but rather a fact-finding inquiry, the hearings have had plenty of courtroom theatrics, including turbo-charged lawyers leaping to their feet to belt objections. There has been a smattering of accusations lobbed across the room to the effect that some attorneys are trolling for material for civil lawsuits.

One document introduced into evidence this week showed that the Macondo job, originally projected as a $96 million operation, was on track to cost $58 million more than anticipated.

BP kept track of estimated completion dates for drilling jobs, and tried to figure out where the rig could go next so that it could stay active and have minimal down time. E-mails discussed by attorneys this week showed that BP hoped to squeeze in a quick job in May - plugging a well called Nile - before tackling a more complex job at another site, the Kaskida well, that might take six months.

"I know you all are under pressure to finish Macondo so we can get Nile P&A moving and not jeopardize the Kaskida well," one BP employee, Merrick Kelley, wrote to Macondo well team member Brian Morel a week before the blowout.

On April 9, David Sims, a BP manager, explained to colleagues in an e-mail that the Nile job was a "gap-filler" between Macondo and Kaskida, and that he hoped the government regulatory agency, the Minerals Management Service, would provide some flexibility in its approved date for starting the Kaskida job because of delays in completing Macondo.

The Macondo well had been a "nightmare," in the words of one team member. The widow of a worker killed in the explosion testified this summer that her husband had told her that "Mother Nature just doesn't want to be drilled here." The first rig to drill the well was damaged in a hurricane and had to quit the job. The Deepwater Horizon, drilling fast, suffered a stuck drill pipe March 8 when the hole collapsed. The crew had to start over, drilling a new hole.

Mathews, the investigator, asked John Guide, the BP well team leader for the Macondo job, whether cost-consciousness colored decisions involving safety.

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