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With non-strategic assets sales behind it, The Woodlands, TX-based Newfield Exploration Co. is focusing on multiple oil and liquids-rich projects and is placing particular emphasis on drilling longer laterals.

Houston-based Chimera Energy Corp. announced on Tuesday that it had received drilling logs from Petroleos Mexicanos (Pemex), the Mexican state-owned petroleum company, and had “formulated a 90-day schedule for the first deployment” of its nonhydraulic shale oil extraction in Mexico’s Chicontepic Basin, even as concerns arose about the accuracy of many of the company’s statements.

In what it said would be its final update of evacuation and shut-in production statistics related to Hurricane Isaac, the Bureau of Safety Environmental Enforcement (BSEE) said Tuesday that two production platforms and a single rig remained evacuated in the Gulf of Mexico (GOM). Based on data from offshore operator reports submitted as of 11:30 a.m. CDT Tuesday, BSEE estimated 4.73% (213 MMcf/d) of natural gas production and 4.16% (57,439 b/d) of oil output in the GOM was shut in. All of those statistics peaked in the immediate aftermath of Isaac, when BSEE reported 509 production platforms and 50 rigs evacuated, and an estimated 75.52% (3.264 Bcf/d) of gas production and 94.99% (1.311 million b/d) of oil production was shut in (see Daily GPI, Aug. 31).

Market dynamics will override politics and the job producing and economic stimulus effects of the gas industry will prevail in the years ahead regardless of the outcome of this fall’s presidential elections, according to panelists at the LDC Gas Forum’s mid-continent meeting in Chicago Monday.

Seven of eight wrongful death lawsuits related to the rupture of a a Pacific Gas and Electric Co. (PG&E) natural gas transmission line in San Bruno, CA two years ago have been settled, PG&E Corp. CEO Anthony Earley said Thursday.

The fourth iteration of the Pennsylvania Department of Environmental Protection’s (DEP) biannual production report issued last week indicated that natural gas production from unconventional wells totaled 894.8 Bcf during the first six months of this year, a figure that includes Marcellus Shale wells along with some targeting the Utica Shale and other formations. Operators also reported producing 672,550 bbl of condensate and 49,194 bbl of oil from January through June.

Midstates Petroleum Co. agreed to pay Eagle Energy Production LLC $650 million in cash and stock for all of Eagle’s producing properties, and both developed and undeveloped acreage, primarily in the Mississippian Lime oil play in Oklahoma and Kansas, the Houston-based producer said Monday.

Gasfrac Energy Services Inc., which has been attempting to muscle into the hydraulic fracturing (fracking) market with its waterless technology, hit some roadblocks in 2Q2012, in part because the pressure pumping market is bursting at the seams, company officials said Thursday.

BHP Billiton Ltd.’s recent announcement of a $2.8B charge for the diminished value of its dry gas Fayetteville Shale assets (see Shale Daily, Aug. 7) wasn’t the only bad shale-related news to come from the Australian company. Its Petrohawk Energy Corp. unit has been turning in sour numbers as well.