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The Muskingum Watershed Conservancy District (MWCD) approved two separate agreements Friday to provide water from several managed lakes in eastern Ohio for approximately three months to Antero Resources and Gulfport Energy Corp. for Utica Shale operations.

Rangeland Energy is buying land near Loving, NM, where it plans to develop a large terminal facility to handle crude oil, frack sand, pipe and other products; plans for a crude oil pipeline to the terminal also are in the works, the company said Monday.

The Muskingum Watershed Conservancy District (MWCD) agreed Friday to lease more than 6,000 acres under one of the lakes it manages in eastern Ohio to Antero Resources, with a bonus payment of nearly $41 million.

Range Resources Corp.’s planned five-rig drilling program for 2013 in the Mississippian Lime, which was scheduled to start up early next year, already is under way based on encouraging results from a crop of wells in the Nemaha Ridge area, the company said Thursday.

For Marcellus Shale producers, the gift-receiving season begins this week and continues through the end of the year in the form of additional pipeline takeaway capacity. Multiple projects are slated to come online between Thursday and the end of the year, giving Marcellus producers increased access to markets, and presumably better prices for their gas.

Sugar Land, TX-based Santrol, a Fairmount Minerals company, now has five Eagle Ford Shale rail terminals to handle proppant used for hydraulic fracturing in the Eagle Ford Shale of South Texas. By expanding to five Eagle Ford terminals, Santrol can ship more than one million tons of proppant per year throughout the formation, the company said. The terminals are supplying Santrol’s northern white frack sand and resin-coated proppants. “We have more terminals with more available rail car capacity than any other frack sand supplier in the region,” said Tom Bonno, Santrol terminal field service manager. The five terminals are located in: Alice, where there are two, Gardendale, Gonzales and San Antonio. All of the terminals operate 24 hours a day, seven days a week.

The decrease in drilling expected in the Marcellus Shale this year could have an unexpected consequence: reducing the amount of flowback water that operators reuse at well sites.

Assuming the can handle any antitrust issues that might come up, Kinder Morgan Inc. (KMI) and El Paso Corp. are heading toward a deal that would create a midstream and pipeline behemoth with thousands of miles of pipelines touching supply basins all over North America.

The New York Department of Environmental Conservation (DEC) has released a proposed rulemaking that would impose additional regulations on natural gas drillers using high-volume hydraulic fracturing (fracking) in the state, and has scheduled a series of hearings on the proposed rulemaking.