Sales

While lower profits in its merchant generation business and a decrease in weather-related energy sales hampered Dominion Resources Inc.’s full-year and 4Q2011 earnings, the Richmond, VA-based company said it has made “significant progress” in developing infrastructure projects to serve the robust shale gas production from the Marcellus and surrounding plays.

Range Resources Corp. is expanding the reach of its Appalachian ethane operation. A subsidiary of the Fort Worth, TX-based company said Thursday it had signed a deal to ship 20,000 b/d on Enterprise Product Partners LP’s proposed Appalachia-to-Texas (Atex Express) ethane pipeline.

ConocoPhillips revealed Wednesday that in the last three months of 2011 it acquired more than 100,000 acres in North American liquids-rich shale plays, bringing its unconventional acquisitions last year to more than 500,000 acres.

The rich are different, and the nouveau riche are different still. Newly premiered reality television show “Bayou Billionaires” demonstrates that it’s a long way from the fictitious East Egg of The Great Gatsby to Shreveport, LA, where Gerald and Kitten Dowden and kin have struck it rich in the Haynesville Shale. Now they want into the country club.

With recent production from the Eagle Ford Shale and Niobrara Formation, Carrizo Oil & Gas Inc. passed its target of 5,000 net b/d, the company announced Wednesday.

The shale gas revolution has improved global energy security and has helped a “mature industry be reborn through technology,” ConocoPhillips CEO Jim Mulva said this week in Qatar.

Shale development and rising oil prices are pushing up domestic demand for oilfield chemicals at a rate of more than 8% a year, according to new research by The Freedonia Group Inc. By 2015 the U.S. market for chemicals should reach $13.6 billion, the Cleveland-based industry analyst said.

The Barnett Shale and Horn River Basin lifted Fort Worth-based Quicksilver Resources Inc. to a quarterly production record during the third quarter while the company continued to chip away at its substantial debt.

Houston-based Boardwalk Pipeline Partners LP has been able to strengthen the value of its natural gas pipeline network by expanding and extending it into North American shale basins over the past few years, but the recent overabundance of gas has resulted in “lower natural gas prices and a reduction in price differentials, both seasonally and between basins,” according to CEO Stanley Horton.