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The Susquehanna River Basin Commission (SRBC) said it will focus on regulatory activities and water quality monitoring related to shale gas development within the basin, as the organization begins its latest two-year Water Resources Program for the fiscal years 2014 and 2015.

Calling them a common sense approach that will complement state efforts, U.S. Interior Secretary Sally Jewell and Bureau of Land Management (BLM) officials Thursday unveiled revised draft rules for hydraulic fracturing (fracking) on all federal and Indian lands. The draft rules will now go through a 30-day public comment period.

There are three major plays that have the full attention of Occidental Petroleum Corp.’s (Oxy) strategy to significantly grow its U.S. drilling operations — California, the Permian Basin and the Bakken — and they each have their different timetables and challenges, said Oxy CEO Stephen Chazen.

The Allegheny County Airport Authority (ACAA), which runs Pittsburgh International Airport and Allegheny County Airport, has accepted the lower of two bids it received to drill Marcellus Shale natural gas wells on airport property.

The wall thickness of a section of pipe on the 20-inch diameter Columbia Gas Transmission system that ruptured Tuesday in West Virginia was significantly deteriorated, said National Transportation Safety Board (NTSB) investigators Thursday. There also was a pressure drop on the line, but the magnitude of the decrease is unknown as was whether drop was the result of the rupture or its cause.

South Africa’s Sasol Ltd. last week put in all the chips on a bet that U.S. natural gas is here to stay, announcing plans to construct a $16-21 billion natural gas-to-liquids (GTL) plant in Westlake, LA — the second largest commercial plant of its kind in the world.

Presumptive Republican presidential candidate Mitt Romney on Thursday unveiled an energy plan that he said would open more federal lands to oil and gas drilling and would make North America energy independent by 2020 — the final year of his second term in office — if he is elected this November.

If the United States were to let loose on the global market some of its bellyful of natural gas reserves, the effect on markets here and abroad as well as on the environment would be modest pretty much across the board, a year-long study of potential liquefied natural gas (LNG) exports by the Brookings Institution has concluded.

All the things that North America’s natural gas operators are doing today to gin up demand for the fuel here and abroad — liquefied natural gas (LNG) exports, increased use as a transportation fuel, petrochemical facility expansions, power plant conversions from coal to gas and more — already are being investigated by ExxonMobil Corp. today, an executive said last week.