Jamison Cocklin

Oklahoma City-based Gulfport Energy Corp. has added three members to its Ohio management team, bolstering oversight of one of the company’s largest operating assets, the Utica Shale.

With the help of county-level officials, researchers at West Virginia University (WVU) continue to press ahead with an air quality study at Marcellus drilling sites across the state, finding elevated levels of benzene in the air that they claim are of concern.

Yet another poll has been released gauging support for TransCanada Corp.’s Keystone XL pipeline, this time showing that an overwhelming bipartisan majority of American voters are in favor of the project and other large-scale energy infrastructure development across the country.

Pennsylvania wastewater management company Eureka Resources LLC plans tobegin operating a $25 million crystallizer and methanol recovery system in Lycoming and Bradford counties in 2014 that it began in 2012 (see Shale Daily, May 21, 2012). The systems would separate metals and other components from produced oil and gas water to make oil, methanol and sodium chloride that would be sold back to energy producers, wholesalers and manufacturers.

PDC Energy Inc. increased its capital expenditure budget (capex) for 2014 to $647 million as it prepares to target core acreage in Colorado’s Wattenberg field and Ohio’s Utica Shale in an effort to boost its liquids mix to 60%.

Standard & Poor’s Ratings Services last year deemed the Marcellus Shale as the lowest-cost play in the country with the highest rate of return, indicating that production there was a drop in the bucket compared to what truly was underground (see Shale Daily, Oct. 18, 2012).

Magnum Hunter Resources Corp. will continue to push ahead in 2014 with plans to focus more sharply on its core assets in the Marcellus and Utica shale regions of West Virginia and Ohio, with plans to spend more than half of its capital budget in Appalachia next year.

Although brutally cold weather across much of the country is driving up natural gas delivery costs for utility companies, particularly those in the Northeast, increased production in the Marcellus and Utica shale formations has continued to push down the price customers are paying for the commodity this year as more utilities utilize local gas produced in the Appalachian Basin.

Two independent producers unveiled their capital expenditure budgets this week and gave an early update on production guidance for 2014 in basins stretching from Texas to the Rocky Mountains.