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Unconventional natural gas activity supported more than one million jobs in 2010, a number that is likely to grow to nearly 1.5 million by 2015. The industry is expected to generate significant job creation, economic growth and tax revenues nationwide — in producing and non-producing states alike — according to a new report from IHS Global Insight.

Ohio’s laws addressing old leases and conservation issues could pose some unique challenges to proponents of energy development in the state’s portions of the Marcellus and Utica shales, two attorneys with the law firm Steptoe & Johnson LLP said during a presentation Wednesday.

Two earthquakes that recently shook the area around the East Texas town of Timpson were unlikely to have been caused by natural gas drilling or drilling waste disposal activities, according to the Railroad Commission of Texas (RRC).

Even with the huge Marcellus Shale, the high cost of natural gas vehicles and a lack of infrastructure to fuel the vehicles may deter growth in the state, according to the Allegheny Conference on Community Development.

While this is “out of my area of expertise, I think…it’s inevitable that natural gas is going to be a world commodity, and that because of very substantial price differentials between the price in this country and the prices in Europe and Asia it will happen,” FERC Chairman Jon Wellinghoff said during a roundtable briefing with reporters at the agency’s headquarters in Washington, DC.

The top geologists in Colorado and Oklahoma, two states with significant shale resources, say researchers with the U.S. Geological Survey (USGS) were hasty in suggesting that injection wells used to dispose of wastewater from oil and gas drilling are responsible for an increase in earthquakes in the Midcontinent region.

Will ethane production from shale plays in Appalachia support all of the ethane projects proposed for the region?

Shell Chemical LP has chosen a rural area outside of Pittsburgh as the potential location for a major petrochemical complex that could include an ethane cracker in the heart of the Marcellus Shale.

Although still far from committing to a project, Shell Chemical LP delighted Pennsylvanians Thursday by choosing a rural area outside of Pittsburgh as the potential location for a major petrochemical complex that could include an ethane cracker in the heart of the Appalachian Basin.