Already

The United States is already significantly “energy independent” in most sectors, with transportation fuels being the notable exception, according to a Deloitte study. Here, alternative fuels, including natural gas, can bolster U.S. energy security, which is a more attainable goal than independence, the firm said.

Majors and national oil companies (NOC) are about to go shopping again, and their most likely targets are companies such as Anadarko Petroleum Corp., EOG Resources Inc., Whiting Petroleum Corp., Kodiak Oil & Gas Corp. and Forest Oil Corp., Wells Fargo Securities analysts said in a note last week.

Market dynamics will override politics and the job producing and economic stimulus effects of the gas industry will prevail in the years ahead regardless of the outcome of this fall’s presidential elections, according to panelists at the LDC Gas Forum’s mid-continent meeting in Chicago Monday.

City council members in Lafayette, CO, agreed Tuesday to consider a temporary ban on oil and natural gas drilling while they revise regulations that have not been updated since 1994.

There are roughly 36,000 shale wells in the five major shale basins in the United States that have produced nearly 23 Tcf of natural gas and 682 million barrels of oil and condensate, according to a tally gleaned from state regulatory records by Powell Shale Digest, a weekly newsletter specializing in North American shale news and research.

A recent analysis of hydraulic fracturing (fracking) data from fracfocus.org and oil and gas well records from eight states, which concluded that nearly half of the wells fracked during the last nine months of 2011 were not disclosed on the website, doesn’t tell the whole story, according to industry sources. The industry supports the disclosure website and continues to flood it with well data, they said.

ExxonMobil Corp.’s production in the Bakken Shale has reached about 32,000 boe/d, which is 60% higher than a year ago and double the amount the company was producing just three years ago, a top executive said Thursday. Two more oil-directed rigs have been added to the play in just the past three months.

Houston-based Dynegy Inc.’s recent filing for Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection and planned merger with its Dynegy Holdings LLC (DH) unit, which was already in bankruptcy, has drawn differing reactions from the two major credit rating agencies, Moody’s Investors Service and Standard & Poor’s Rating Services (S&P).

Information gathered from six separate natural gas development datasets — all currently available on the Pennsylvania Department of Environmental Protection (DEP) website — have been formatted into a single geodatabase file by the Center for Biodiversity and Ecosystems (CBE) at the Carnegie Museum of Natural History, which plans to make the information available through an interactive online map by the end of the year.