Oil

About $60/bbl is the right price to bring producers back to the unconventional oil patch. But it will have to be a solid $60 that sticks around for a while before the smart money gets excited, EOG Resources Inc. CEO Bill Thomas told a Houston audience Wednesday.

The Obama administration released its fiscal year 2017 budget request Tuesday, drawing harsh criticism from oil and gas groups, which accused the president of advancing anti-fossil fuel policies at the expense of consumers.

Gastar Exploration Inc. said it plans to spud a second test well targeting the Meramec formation within Oklahoma’s stacked shale plays after encouraging results from its first test well showed the formation extended farther to the northeast than previously thought.

After 14 months of intransigence, doing nothing will become less of an option for cash-strapped oil and natural gas operators, with some unusual dealmaking expected for mergers and asset sales.

The decades-old ban on U.S. oil exports may be coming to an end.

The Mexican government said its third auction to offer oil and natural gas lease blocks for development was its most successful to date, with peak production from the 25 onshore fields expected to reach 77,000 boe/d and bring in $1.1 billion of investment over the next 25 years.

Production from the eastern United States, including the powerhouse Marcellus Shale, will help make the country the world’s top producer of natural gas this year, ahead of Saudi Arabia, the Energy Information Administration (EIA) said Friday.

Walter Oil & Gashas completed the first phase of plugging a natural gas well in the Gulf of Mexico that blew out in July, according to theInterior Department’sBureau of Safety and Environmental Enforcement(BSEE). The well blowout partially destroyed a Hercules Inc. rig, but as responders were working on ways to prevent releases, the well naturally clogged with sand (seeDaily GPI,July 30). All of the debris from the original well had been removed as of Friday (Sept. 6), and no gas has been detected, BSEE said. Regulators said the original well would be reentered at a later date to set deeper, permanent plugs.

Last year’s 50-year oil production record in Colorado may be broken again this year, according to the latest production statistics from the Colorado Oil and Gas Conservation Commission (OGCC). The statistics cover January through May.