Phillips 66 announced May 18 it is moving forward with the Zeus Gas Plant and a third Coastal Bend Fractionator, two projects that will advance its integrated wellhead-to-market strategy, thereby expanding gas processing capacity in the Permian and NGL fractionation capabilities on the Gulf Coast. Zeus will be a 300 MMcf/d gas processing facility in […]

The Society of Petroleum Engineers (SPE) board of directors elected Jonna D. Smoot, Business Development professional at Lanmark Engineering, to its board and tapped her to serve as Programs Co-Chair. Meanwhile, the board of the Produced Water Society (PWS) elected Smoot to serve as Permian Basin Chapter President for the Produced Water Society (PWS). The […]

The Railroad Commission of Texas has reported runaway costs for plugging and remediating so-called “orphan” wells. The commission estimates that it will cost $202 million to plug its inventory of orphan wells approved for state-funded remediation and decommissioning, the highest total in the program’s history. (See Figure 1.) Texas is on a well-plugging hamster wheel […]

Enverus Intelligence Research (EIR), a subsidiary of Enverus, an energy data analytics platform, has released its latest report, Electrification Load Forecast: The L48 Goes Electric, highlighting the growing role of electrification in shaping U.S. power demand. Electrification is expected to add approximately 24 GW of incremental load by 2035 and about 78 GW by 2050 across […]

Members of the Railroad Commission of Texas’ (RRC) State Task force on Petroleum Theft (STOPTheft) gathered in Midland on April 2 to continue their work addressing the challenges of petroleum theft in Texas. Led by RRC Chairman Jim Wright, the session opened with a brief overview of the task force’s duties, subcommittees, and timeline goals […]

The United Arab Emirates announced it late April that it would leave The Organization of the Petroleum Exporting Countries (OPEC) after six decades of membership, effective May 1. The UAE is one of the Middle East’s largest oil producers, behind Saudi Arabia and Iraq. We (Morningstar) see the latest move as a continuation of the […]

Carbon capture initiatives are typically presented with a focus on new and emerging technologies, large scale capital projects, and ambitious decarbonization goals. However, behind each successful carbon capture, utilization, and storage (CCUS) project, there exists a much less visible, but equally important, foundation upon which those projects depend: precise chemical composition measurement of gas streams. […]

The U.S. petrochemical sector remains one of the main drivers of the national economy. The American Chemistry Council (ACC) estimates that production of basic chemicals will rebound by 1.2 percent this year, increasing its contribution to the country’s economy by more than $900 million this year, breaking the downward trend of recent years. In addition, […]

Robotics is rapidly transforming oil and gas operations as advances in artificial intelligence (AI) and cloud computing unlock the next phase of industrial automation. AI enables advanced decision-making, navigation in complex environments, and reduced reliance on human intervention. Against this backdrop, the global robotics market is projected to grow from $90.2 billion in 2024 to […]