DIRECTIONS: Read the following and answer all the questions?
http://www.americanenglishconversation.com/
http://www.freeenglishconversation.blogspot.com/
http://www.grammar-help.blogspot.com/
ALLENTOWN, Pa. (AP) -- Two unexpected gushers in northeastern Pennsylvania are helping to illustrate the enormous potential of the Marcellus Shale natural gas field.
Each of the Cabot Oil & Gas Corp. wells in Susquehanna County is capable of producing 30 million cubic feet per day -- believed to be a record for the Marcellus and enough gas to supply nearly 1,000 homes for a year. The landowners attached to the wells, who leased the well access, numbering fewer than 25, are splitting hundreds of thousands of dollars in monthly royalties.
"There was definitely excitement among the team that planned out these wells and executed their completion," said Cabot spokesman George Stark.
Drilling companies knew the Marcellus held a lot of gas. They just had to figure out a way to get it out, and they say they're getting better at it all the time.
The result is that the Marcellus, a rock formation beneath Pennsylvania, New York, West Virginia and Ohio, has turned out to be an even more prolific source of gas than anyone anticipated. Energy firms are boosting their production targets, not only because new wells are coming on line but also because they're managing to coax more gas from each well.
Operators say they have a greater understanding of the complicated geology of the Marcellus, allowing them to land their drill bits in the sweet spot of the formation. They're drilling horizontally at greater distances, giving them access to more of the gas locked within the rock. And they're tweaking how they break apart the shale.
"It's like batting practice," said Matt Pitzarella, spokesman for Range Resources Corp. "The more you swing the bat, the better you get."
Fort Worth, Texas-based Range has boosted its estimate of the amount of natural gas it will ultimately be able to harvest from its Marcellus Shale wells, telling investors this month that it plans to triple production to 600 million cubic feet per day by the end of 2012.
Another major player, Chesapeake Energy Corp., has likewise reported a dramatic increase in expected well production. Early on, the Oklahoma City-based driller predicted that each well would yield 3.5 billion cubic feet of gas over its life span. That amount has since doubled, to more than 7 billion cubic feet, and continues to go up.
"Growing confidence in reserve quality is a major reason why many of the largest, most-successful, domestic and international energy companies are heavily investing in the Marcellus and other American shale plays," said Jeff Fisher, Chesapeake's senior vice president of production.
Indeed, major oil companies like Chevron Corp., Exxon Mobil Corp. and Royal Dutch Shell PLC have placed multibillion-dollar bets on the Marcellus, a 400-million-year-old rock formation that geologists say holds the nation's largest reservoir of natural gas and perhaps the second-largest in the world.
To unlock the shale's riches, drillers combine horizontal drilling with hydraulic fracturing, a technique known as fracking that pumps millions of gallons of water, along with sand and chemicals, into the well to creature fissures in the rock and allow natural gas to flow up. Fracking has raised environmental concerns, and the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency is studying its impact on groundwater. The industry insists the process is environmentally safe.
The technology has unleashed a drilling frenzy in Pennsylvania -- where more than 3,300 Marcellus wells have been sunk the past few years -- and accounts for a twelvefold increase in U.S. shale gas production since 2000. Gas harvested from the Marcellus and other shale fields around the country -- including the Barnett Shale in Texas and the Haynesville Shale in Louisiana -- now represents a quarter of total U.S. natural gas production.
The new Cabot wells help illustrate why boosters believe the gas field could help steer U.S. energy policy for decades to come. They were also a nice bit of good news for Cabot, the Houston-based driller that endured two years of bad publicity after state regulators accused it of polluting water supplies in Dimock Township, Susquehanna County.
The wells -- also located in Dimock -- are "producing like gushers," exulted Stark, the Cabot spokesman, helping to push the company's daily production above 400 million cubic feet per day.
Like other drillers, Cabot has steadily increased the horizontal length of its wells, from an average of 2,100 feet in 2008 to 3,600 feet last year. It has seen a corresponding increase in capacity.
Capacity, though, does not always translate to production.
Cabot's wells, and Marcellus wells in general, are not running at full tilt, mainly because the infrastructure required to take the gas from wellhead to market is not yet fully in place. An oversupply of natural gas and the availability of crews to fracture the wells are other limiting factors.
"We certainly have had to manage our pace of drilling with the installation of pipeline infrastructure and demand in the market," Chesapeake's Fisher said in a statement. "While some delays in production startups are common in the early phase of these large-scale plays, the industry is working hard to build the infrastructure that will enable Marcellus reserves to get to market for decades to come."
The Marcellus isn't the only shale formation in Pennsylvania that energy companies have their eye on. Drillers are just beginning to explore the gas-bearing Utica and Upper Devonian formations. The Utica is deeper that the Marcellus, and the Upper Devonian is shallower.
"It's triple the resource potential under the same plot of land," said Kevin Cabla, an energy analyst at Raymond James & Associates.
NEW YORK (AP) -- A member of a publicity-seeking hacker group that sabotaged websites over the past two months and is dissolving itself says his group isn't disbanding under pressure from the FBI or enemy hackers.
"We're not quitting because we're afraid of law enforcement," the LulzSec member said in a conversation with The Associated Press over the Internet voice program Skype. "The press are getting bored of us, and we're getting bored of us."
The group's hacking has included attacks on law enforcement and releases of private data. It said unexpectedly on Saturday it was dissolving itself.
In the Sunday interview, the hacker acknowledged that some of the material being circulated by rivals online -- which purports to reveal the hackers' online nicknames, past histories, and chat logs -- was genuine, something he said had proved to be "a distraction."
He added that three or four of Lulz Security's members were taking what he called "a breather" and said he was considering giving up cyberattacks altogether.
"Maybe I'll stop this hacking thing entirely. I haven't decided," he said. He said he couldn't speak for the others' long-term plans, but said it was possible some of the members would continue to be involved with Anonymous, the much larger and more amorphous hacking group which has targeted the Church of Scientology, Middle Eastern dictatorships, and the music industry, among others.
He said the six-member group was still sitting on a considerable amount of stolen law enforcement files.
Related Quotes
| Symbol | Price | Change |
| CVX | 102.76 | -0.69 |
| |
| JPM | 39.90 | +0.06 |
| |
| XOM | 77.72 | -0.12 |
| |
{"s" : "cvx,jpm,xom","k" : "a00,a50,b00,b60,c10,g00,h00,l10,p20,t10,v00","o" : "","j" : ""} Paul Wiseman and David K. Randall, AP Business Writers, On Wednesday August 3, 2011, 5:35 pm EDT
WASHINGTON (AP) -- Shoppers won't shop. Companies won't hire. The government won't spend on economic stimulus -- it's cutting instead. And the Federal Reserve is reluctant to do anything more.
Without much to invigorate growth, the economy may be in danger of slipping into a stupor like the one Japan has failed to shake off for more than a decade. And Wall Street is spooked.
The Dow Jones industrial average Wednesday barely broke an eight-day losing streak, finishing up about 30 points. A nine-day losing streak would have been the Dow's first since February 1978.
Even with the gain, the Dow has fallen 828 points, or 6.5 percent, over the past nine trading days. Investors didn't even pause to celebrate the resolution over the weekend of a dangerous debt standoff in Washington.
Stunned by news last week that the economy barely grew in the first half of 2011, economists are lowering their forecasts for the full year and recalculating the odds that the economy will slide back into recession.
Kurt Karl, chief U.S. economist at Swiss Re, has cut his 2011 forecast for growth this year to 1.8 percent from 2.6 percent. And he has bumped up the likelihood of another recession to 20 percent from 15 percent.
"The last week has made it much more likely that corporate profit estimates will be revised lower," said Nick Kalivas, a vice president of financial research at MF Global.
The stocks that have fallen the furthest have been those of companies that fare best in economic expansions. Industrial companies like Caterpillar and Boeing, energy companies like Exxon Mobil and Chevron, and retailers like Amazon and Coach have all fallen by more than the broader stock market.
Investors have pushed government bond yields to their lowest level of the year. The 10-year Treasury note now yields 2.6 percent. Bond yields typically fall when the economy is weak because nervous investors view bonds as a safe place to park their money, and there's less chance that inflation will erode their value.
The economy started sputtering early in the year. Economists at first thought the slowdown would be temporary, the result of a short-term rise in gasoline prices and an earthquake in Japan that disrupted shipments of auto parts and electronics.
But the weakness persisted. And it worsened as a political fight over debt and deficits raised the risk that the U.S. government would not be able to pay all its bills.
"It now seems fairly clear that those shocks have done a lot more damage than we expected," says Leo Abruzzese, global forecasting director for the Economist Intelligence Unit. "They seem to have had a devastating effect on confidence."
After the government reported that the economy grew at an annual pace of 0.4 percent in the first quarter and 1.3 percent in the second, Abruzzese is cutting his estimate for 2011 growth from 2.4 percent to less than 2 percent.
It's hard to see anything lifting growth to the 2.5 percent needed to keep unemployment from rising, let alone the 5 percent needed to bring the rate down significantly from June's 9.2 percent.
"Sales are what keeps the market moving higher, and there's not much demand when there's only 0.4 percent growth," said Andrew Goldberg, U.S. market strategist at JP Morgan Funds.
When the economy grows less than 2 percent over a 12-month period, it risks slipping into recession, says Mark Vitner, senior economist at Wells Fargo Securities. Over the most recent such period, the economy grew just 1.6 percent.
Few economists are predicting another recession, despite a series of weak economic reports. Gasoline prices have come down from their high of almost $4 a gallon in May. And Japanese factories are starting to crank up again after the March earthquake.
At the heart of the economy's problems are the debts that consumers built up during the early and mid-2000s. Many borrowed against the equity in their homes, convinced that house prices would rise forever.
When housing prices collapsed, people were left owing more than their homes were worth. Others charged up their credit cards. Now it's payback time, and Americans are spending less or spending cautiously as they slash their debts.
Companies are reluctant to hire until they're convinced enough customers are ready to buy their products or services. Corporate profits are booming, though, because companies laid off millions of workers, learned to operate more efficiently with smaller staffs and expanded in growing markets overseas.
"If companies were inclined to hire, they could," Abruzzese says.
So companies are waiting for consumers to spend, and consumers are waiting for companies to hire them or offer generous pay raises and job security. It's a tough cycle to break.
In the past, the government has helped by spending on infrastructure projects or jobs programs. This time, it's cutting at all levels. In the second quarter, government cutbacks reduced economic growth by 0.2 percentage points.
More cuts are coming. The deal to raise the debt limit calls for $917 billion in federal spending cuts. Those won't do much immediate damage to the economy because they mostly kick in after 2013, but a special congressional committee is supposed to find at least another $1.2 trillion in savings over the next decade, and no one knows where the ax will fall.
"You're not sure if there are going to be huge spending cuts or tax increases. Or are they just going to wrangle?" Swiss Re economist Karl says. "If you're a supplier to any part of the government, you certainly are not rushing to hire people or buy equipment. There's definitely a damper on growth."
To some economists, the United States is starting to look eerily like Japan. The Japanese economy fell into a recession in the early `90s. It has never fully returned to health, largely because of policy mistakes. The government raised taxes after declaring victory over the downturn prematurely. And U.S. economists, including current Fed Chairman Ben Bernanke, criticized the Japanese central bank, the Bank of Japan, for being too passive to turn the economy around.
The Fed has kept short-term interest rates near zero since December 2008 to stimulate the economy. But at the end of June, it ended a $600 billion program to buy government bonds and keep long-term rates -- the ones that determine the rates people pay on cars and houses -- low.
It was the second round of what economists call quantitative easing, or QE2 for short. But the Fed has no plans for a third, fearing it would lead to higher inflation.
Kenneth Rogoff, a Harvard University economist, says that in this economy, QE3 -- and, if necessary, QE4 and beyond -- is the only hope.
"Yes, we are starting to look like Japan," he says. "But it is not too late."
Randall reported from New York.
A. TRUE
B. FALSE
A. TRUE
B. FALSE
