Respectively

The North Carolina Senate on Wednesday passed a bill to legalize hydraulic fracturing (fracking) and begin the process of creating a regulatory framework for the practice.

Chesapeake Energy Corp. said in a regulatory filing Friday that it may have to delay some of the planned oil and natural gas asset sales this year, which could up be to $14 billion, because low natural gas prices may stretch its ability to comply with credit covenants.

Purestream Technology has contracted with Whiting Oil and Gas Corp. to deploy its Avara System, which can process up to 2,000 bbls of flowback water daily, for a water treatment project in Mountrail County, ND, to support Whiting’s operations in the Williston Basin. The clean finished water will be returned for continued use in hydraulic fracturing. The Avara system was developed in partnership with Utah State University’s Energy and Space Dynamics Labs.

Noble Energy Inc. and CONSOL Energy Inc. have clinched their joint venture agreement to develop a swath of Marcellus Shale properties in southwest Pennsylvania and northwest West Virginia, the companies said Monday.

A survey conducted by the consulting firm PwC indicates that oil and gas industry executives are confident that their companies’ information security practices will provide protection from cyber attacks, despite poor intelligence of how and when future attacks could be mounted.

The Pennsylvania Department of Environmental Protection (DEP) said Tuesday it is reorganizing, a move designed to assist regulators with a burgeoning workload from the state’s booming oil and gas industry in the Marcellus Shale.

Much of the country can expect temperatures to average warmer than normal throughout the summer, with population centers in the Northeast likely to experience increasingly intense and widespread heat into August and September, according to forecasters at Andover, MA-based WSI Corp.

Active rigs in U.S. shale and tight sands basins gained 1% in the week ending April 1 to hit 981 rigs, up from 972 the previous week, according to NGI’s Shale Daily Unconventional Rig Count.

The top two concerns for oil and gas company executives in 2011 are uncertainty in natural gas and crude oil prices, respectively, according to an annual report by Grant Thornton LLP.