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Rex Energy Corp. exited 2014 producing 154.4 MMcfe/d, a 66% increase from the previous year that exceeded the high end of its guidance and came with gains in its core areas of western Pennsylvania and southeast Ohio, the company said Tuesday.

Houston-based Oasis Petroleum Inc. continued water and soil sampling Monday after one of its pipelines spewed 42,000 gallons of salty wastewater into a pool and small creek that are part of a tributary to a Missouri River reservoir in McKenzie County in northwest North Dakota.

Rex Energy Corp. plans to put a newly contracted rig to work at the beginning of next year in its Moraine East area in Butler County, PA, which it received in a $120 million deal last month with Royal Dutch Shell plc affiliate SWEPI LP (see Shale Daily, Aug. 13).

Deep wastewater injection from the oil/natural gas sector is most likely responsible for the sharp increase in the number of small earthquakes recorded since 2001 in the Colorado-New Mexico border area, according to a study published in the Bulletin of the Seismological Society of America (BSSA).

With California Gov. Jerry Brown on Tuesday requesting that the three-county South Napa earthquake area be designated as a disaster area by the Obama administration, officials for Pacific Gas and Electric Co. (PG&E) are calling the combination utility’s coordinated quake response an indicator of how far it has come in improving its safety and emergency responsiveness.

The U.S. Geological Survey (USGS) on Sunday recorded a small earthquake in Weathersfield Township, OH, about 12 miles northwest of Youngstown, in Trumbull County, but it remains unclear if two nearby underground injection wells are to blame.

Cook Inlet Energy LLC was the successful bidder for an exploration license covering 168,581 acres of Alaska state land in the Iniskin Peninsula area of southwest Cook Inlet, the Alaska Division of Oil and Gas said Wednesday.

Rex Energy Corp. said Wednesday that the momentum it has been building since late last year continued throughout the second quarter, with improving completion techniques, reduced drilling days and greater scale helping to cut costs and boost production.

Rex Energy Corp. on Monday increased its full-year guidance by 2 MMcfe/d, citing better than expected production results and greater certainty in its completion and sales schedule in Pennsylvania and Ohio.