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Australia’s Austin Exploration Ltd. has struck an agreement for Houston-based Halcon Resources Corp. to participate in its Birch Project in the northeastern Eagle Ford Shale. Halcon’s founders are Eagle Ford veterans, having pioneered the play with a previous company.

FERC has approved a request from Spectra Energy unit Algonquin Gas Transmissions to begin a pre-filing review process for the company’s proposed Algonquin Incremental Market (AIM) Project, a significant step forward for the long-awaited pipeline, which would deliver to the Northeast critically needed gas from Pennsylvania.

The U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) apparently has come to the conclusion that U.S. shale gas is too good a thing to not share with the rest of the world in larger quantities.

The House has introduced legislation that would open federal waters off the coast of Virginia to oil and natural gas development, and the Senate is expected to offer a companion bill in the coming weeks.

Appalachian midstream provider MarkWest Energy Partners LP and private equity fund The Energy and Minerals Group (EMG) have completed an amendment to give EMG a larger stake in their joint venture (JV) in the Utica Shale.

China’s Sinopec International Petroleum Exploration and Production Corp. has added to its considerable leasehold in the Mississippian Lime formation after agreeing to pay Chesapeake Energy Corp. $1.02 billion in cash for half of its 850,000 net acres.

Drilling in Eastern Tennessee’s dry gas Chattanooga Shale play has ceased due to low natural gas prices, so the focus has shifted to extracting oil from the state’s Fort Payne formation, which lies atop the Chattanooga. Miller Energy Resources, Inc. this week is shipping its first tanker truckload of oil produced from the Fort Payne’s only unconventional well, according to Gary Bible, vice president of geology for the Knoxville, TN-based firm.

General Electric’s (GE) ever-larger bet on energy, particularly the oil and natural gas equipment sector, appears to be paying off as the industrial conglomerate on Friday reported stronger-than-expected profits for 4Q2012.

With the introduction of new risk controls, the British government has cleared the way for hydraulic fracturing (fracking) to resume in the country where the shale gas reserve could be 4.2 Tcf, according to one estimate.